when is nation? where do we draw the line? (one for soyinka)
by MIGUEL BYRD
in Fall 2024
Trey Campbell, from Room Service, 2024
Stateless might be a compliment
Our world-sense exists outside
the periphery, the blind spots of
nationalism, where the imagination
dies and the violence of forgetting
lives.
There were no marigolds
in the sowing of the seeds of
state where representative government
and slavery planted together the
harvest of our inevitable disaster
Slave ships, the Euro mini-state
A prison we haven’t left
the bones scattered across
the ocean floor resemble
those in labs of Princeton
and Penn, You dropped
a bomb on me
on Osage in the gap
between autonomous Africas
and Western governance
Where do we move? Inward
to our we, together, kin
not citizen, Palmares, Tonga
the circle of our common being
Where we find each other in
the maze of existence
at the point where we are one
and individually incomplete.
Miguel Byrd is a 6th grade history teacher from Elizabeth, New Jersey. His love of poetry was reignited when he spent several weeks teaching the art form to second graders last school year. The enthusiasm and willingness around poetry that his students expressed sent him back to revisit the works of Sterling Allen Brown, Sonia Sanchez, and René Depestre. He spends his time away from teaching focused primarily on reading literature dealing with who Africans are to each other, working towards ways to apply conceptual categories from the Africana Studies framework to each lesson plan.
