Grand Bassam Saudade
for the victims of the Grand Bassam terrorist attack & the people of Grand Bassam
after Joana Choumali’s exhibit, “Ça va aller, a series of iPhone photographs printed on cotton canvas, and hand-embroidered.
this silence / is like
a shroud
I do not / know how
to unstitch it / nor do I
wish to
it keeps / the unsayable
intact / needled
together
//
each word / pearls
on my tongue
like water
over stone
no one / can yank
the skein / of sorrow
from my mouth
//
how do I helm this ship home
when the last hymn
I hear is the sea’s
metal slurry?
//
was the ocean / light or dark?
did a bullet stray / between waves
to unmake / another life?
did the sun die / in the water / that day?
//
only memory
has a voice
which percolates
through walls
of brine & longing
//
what’s left / is the numb sky —
a stretch / of leaden sediment —
this beach still stained
with waves unspooling
into nothingness
riddled with filaments
of algae / like loose thread
//
all of night is grief’s province
ever-generous, giving of itself
endlessly, no peace,
but an endless debris
of memories
night unsheathes my eyes
monsters forth its orphan chant
whets the edge between
the living & the dead
//
I am tethered to this town
that mends itself again & again
with tendrils of seaweed &
knotted rock this is
my foothold though I
scramble to stay
afloat
//
that day still lives / in me,
but I will let / the loom
of colour / thread / through
//
the sun proceeds/ loosens
itself from the ruins /swims
toward the darkness
the waves / over
each unstitched loop
like a mouth / widening
into speech
