Poem to Chibok, Nigeria, and: Prodigal
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Poem to Chibok, Nigeria
#bringbackourgirls
I think of you as I stir the sauce—garlic,oil, tomatoes I pressed through the mill—imagine the spoons your daughters gripin strange rooms. Dear mothers, dailyI ask for your daughters' return to you, safely.When the men said married off,I added to their original families.How careful we must be in our prayers.
I think of your daughters stirring at fire pitsor stoves, open doorways framing the noonthat leads nowhere, the air itself a prison,young women stirring words in their heads.I think of the words in your hearts,the words you shout in the streets.God bless your shouting.
A mother is a mother all her life.All daughters are our daughters.We feel the space in our bodieswhere they lived, we feel the echoof their skin against our palmswhen we held hands crossing the street.Our hands miss their hands. [End Page 84]
Dear mothers, I think of your grief in this absence,your sorrow when they talked about truce,the bitter flavor those lies left. What is a familyripped apart? Empty, the way the pot is empty,after it is washed and dried.
Prodigal
The house exhales behind me, drains its rooms of resting air. The physics of leavingechoes in my kitchen cupboards
as though my heart's four chambers emptied in one beat. The theater of waiting.Maybe the curtains fidget.
The daughter arrives in town minutes after I must exit for a desk at the office complex.And thus the house sighs.
By my day's end, the stop-start-stop home, she will have left with friends.The physics of drama.
Light chases the shadow's face and the cat follows the sun on the rug. The door asks and asksan open-ended question. [End Page 85]
Joannie Stangeland is the author of In Both Hands and Into the Rumored Spring, both published by Ravenna Press, and two chapbooks. Her poems have also appeared in Superstition Review, Off the Coast, Hubbub, Crab Creek Review, and other journals and anthologies.
