West Africa, 1973

When we talk about horses, we talk
about things too beautiful to forget
& too slippery to remember. How is it

that a man’s body is a shrine & not a farmland?

In the legend of the first flood,
every horse was a sick bird inside a dead tree.
No one knew Night was capable of beauty

in the year of the snake. They say I must not eat

eggs. I must drink only from the mouth
of snails. Behold, girls my age cannot even tell
the innocence of water. They set the ocean

on fire & let its smoke consume my baobab tree.

Ask what boy was not already fatherless
when the body calls the finger in its throat a knife
& I will ask what mothers tell their daughters

what fathers must not tell their sons? Here,

we talk about horses as if they were
only slippery not beautiful. We remember
the sick bird but forget the dead tree inside where feathers

become wings. Is a cloud still not a prediction

of vanishment? In the year of my sprouting hips,
they say I must burn every truth that will not take root.
I must talk about Night as if it were capable of beauty.

Bola is the author of Skeleton of a Ruined Song. An award-winning poet, with poems appearing in a few journals like Frontier Poetry, Rattle, CBC Books, The Nottingham Review, The Puritan, Literary Review of Canada, Sierra Nevada Review, The Indianapolis Review, Canadian Literature, and many more. He holds a degree in City Planning and lives in Winnipeg MB. Bola is currently Arts Community Director with Winnipeg Arts Council.

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