Love in a Time of Chaos
for O; after Craig Santos Perez
If only I could build you a home they cannot
wreck. Somewhere
among baobab trees, part their leaves gently
like a lover’s breath
behind the ear. I want to love you where
I’m certain the sun
will reach. A place clean & chlorophyll
green. In the city
we once kissed, all the water is starting to stain.
Propane. Gasoline.
Industrial sewage & atrazine from pesticide
sprays. I walk to
Isimmiri, hoping to sit there on the shore
the way we did
when we were small—just sitting there—while
the herons ate up
the fishes. How we never tried to fend them off.
All of us clueless,
as kids are, when they know nothing yet about
harm. Now the fishes
are poisoned & with that, the birds are gone.
Everything is happening
fast. First it was the news about endangerment
of kākāpōs & honeybees.
Then another of how the rise in sea level is sinking
Tubalu. My god.
Wreckage is such a foreign phrase until you look
out your window
& find it there. Do you still remember my first
attempt at swimming?
You said, If you slip I’ll catch you. As if I was
a stalk & you the root.
As if like Moses you’d split a river just for me.
I want to love
you in that vastness between the heron & the fish,
between the pollutant
& the gills. In a world we both know is hurting.
Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s debut poetry chapbook, EXILED, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks (2024). His poems appear in Cincinnati Review, Adroit Journal, Hudson Review, ONLY POEMS, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. He won the Hudson Review Inaugural Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2024 Isele Magazine Poetry Prize.
Read “Breaking News,” a poem by Chiwenite Onyekwelu also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by oceanfishing, courtesy Shutterstock.
