What Birds Sing of in Libya, and: Resurrection
Rent from DeepDyve- What Birds Sing of in Libya, and: Resurrection
What Birds Sing of in Libya
after Ross Kemp
In Brak, Surman, and places in Libya governed by water,what breaks the night is mostly songs—the lilt,the open pulse of thrushes warbling their cadence,casting their burdens upon the waters; the sheer miracleof Aves urging men to love again,calling them to images craving tenderness:
Migrants, modern slaves, huddled on little boats,crossing the Mediterranean—a grave wide enoughfor the numbers—into the unknown, through the same routesdesert septs took while importing human commoditiesinto North Africa three centuries ago.
On tonight's playlist, there are moving birdsongs:two for wishes that survive the desert but end in dinghiesferrying favoured bunches to unnamed countries,to likely death; some more for women,hopeful housemaids, who have their Italy-bound dreamsdiverted to desert brothels; or young men in captive,crying, praying their ransom. The flock, unwavering,dissecting the waters with their rhythm, preaching loveyet again, calling humanity to the loss of itself. [End Page 168]
Resurrection
along the coasts of Northern Africa
On the fortnight of your return,they would bunch around the evening fireto learn of your resurrection: the unhallowed seasonof the sea, the throes, the convention of birdson the route where the smugglersjoined you to a truck towards the waters;and the sovereignty of dust in half-empty towns,past the caves and their autonomy of green—foliages retelling parables of no return.How the sea beyond keeps no recordof the drowned and those it washed ashore,how you, too, are a Lazarus of the Nile. [End Page 169]
'Gbenga Adeoba's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Hotel Amerika, Poet Lore, Salamander Magazine, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He lives in Nigeria.
