- Blue Water
The water remained blue across centuries of swallowing.Because it is not a cemetery, it does not date its memories.
On the sky is a diary that cataloged eyes lost to the sea.
In the language of a gong, water clashes against the rocks,an elegy to the fish that embalmed our dead inside their cold bodies.
After the new millennium, I learned to love what I cannot keep.
A seed vault was built outside a deserted city;obscured by grief, we searched for familiar faces in the shadows.
The mouth of the sea widens, every songin a foreign tongue begins to sound like a prayer. [End Page 75]
Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist. His poems and translations are featured or forthcoming in Poetry, Waxwing, AzonaL, Transition Magazine, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Mississippi.