Entering the Prairie, and: Some Speak of the Morning

Entering the Prairie, and: Some Speak of the Morning Salawu Olajide (bio) Entering the Prairie The bare airport is filled with humanoid voice,robots asking questions about your journey history.From the third world of my memory,I am the bird with soiled plumageI am the evidence of the shore-outcast.One by one we proceed into the Air Max,bounded towards the Northwest,leaving the city of water;Vancouver of eagles searchingfor mountains' chests. Vancouver of brooding waterand boats of men looking for fishwaddling through dark aqua.Over the hills and their spiky headsthe plane climbs, and I binge overthe pain of leaving, and those who stand in it.I watch patches of snow mustering courageover the fiddling summer sun.In between the hills, streams run towards the seabankbefore winter holds them hostage as blizzards.Or are they banished migrants too, exiled to earth?A herd of clouds move past in slowmotion and I wonder where they are going.We head towards a new history now,not of hills and their white clothes,not of streams losing their grip in August,not of birds running outside the haze,but of lands, level-headed, called the prairie. [End Page 62] Some Speak of the Morning On the four walls of the room,There is pestilence of silence,It is as if I have squanderedAll the joy inside me, As if I have a sea holedIn my face, fetched to desert.In the halo of long dark nightThere is nothing but worms Roaming across the corridorsOf my skull, dancing kumbayaOrdering the capitalism of my sleep.My pillows are soaked with the dreamsIt is an inaccurate jokeTo think positive these days. On the radioSome speak of the morning the sun will dropOn the earth and spill its last litter Some say a fallen heaven is not a lonely warI speak for myself as a monolithWaiting for the first knockOf salvation. [End Page 63] Salawu Olajide Salawu Olajide is a Nigerian poet and author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published by the African Poetry Book Fund. His works have also appeared in Oxford Review of Books, Literary Review of Canada, the Journal, Grain, LitHub, the Mantle, and so on. He was a Vancouver Manuscript Intensive fellow for 2022. Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press

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