Footprints on a trail of rust & salt at Aného
Martins Deep
& i'm knee-deep in the water that remembers
me only as a seed of the drowning— a body shaken off the edge of a statistic paper
with pencil dust & ellipsis, alongside a thousand others asleep on a coraled seabed.
You see, among other things i suspect i'm an incarnate of is a salmon.
By this, i mean to tell you i'm seeking home by smell— sniffing the air
for the smoke of steamships that looted this soil of her innocence
mummified into bronze statues & other sacred sculptures.
I wash my face with brine & i'm a witness in this hazy memory of a widow
on whose footprints i stand where she knelt to send prayers for a slaveship,
like Noah's dove, but it returned to her as flotsam.
I taste this water, & my eyes opens to see ancestors following the North Star
to the shores of a boy's tears sketching on the blank pages of a history textbook,
a geographical map of Freetown. the water in my cupped palms is memorabilia
in liquid state. its salt touches a cut in my hand, & the ache of leash, whip & slur returns.
A wave comes from behind me. i let my essence return with it where there is
a black man dreaming of home on the seafloor, speech bubbles leaving his parted lips.
This is a mouth of history long mistaken for a port. it speaks, i listen. i feel
its scalding sputter of red & salt on my face. it retells, i'm all eyes.
It coughs out a driftwood on whose surface speights misspelled names of kindred
as slaves. i kneel beside it, erasing the word with a carving knife.
Broken, i sing. on my knees, i sing, & in the background, hear
Harriet Tubman, & the footfalls of seventy matching pass me--
their cottoned injuries leaking
sugarcane juice as they trail freedom, breath-borne, towards the orange sun.
& i'm knee-deep in the water that remembers
me only as a seed of the drowning— a body shaken off the edge of a statistic paper
with pencil dust & ellipsis, alongside a thousand others asleep on a coraled seabed.
You see, among other things i suspect i'm an incarnate of is a salmon.
By this, i mean to tell you i'm seeking home by smell— sniffing the air
for the smoke of steamships that looted this soil of her innocence
mummified into bronze statues & other sacred sculptures.
I wash my face with brine & i'm a witness in this hazy memory of a widow
on whose footprints i stand where she knelt to send prayers for a slaveship,
like Noah's dove, but it returned to her as flotsam.
I taste this water, & my eyes opens to see ancestors following the North Star
to the shores of a boy's tears sketching on the blank pages of a history textbook,
a geographical map of Freetown. the water in my cupped palms is memorabilia
in liquid state. its salt touches a cut in my hand, & the ache of leash, whip & slur returns.
A wave comes from behind me. i let my essence return with it where there is
a black man dreaming of home on the seafloor, speech bubbles leaving his parted lips.
This is a mouth of history long mistaken for a port. it speaks, i listen. i feel
its scalding sputter of red & salt on my face. it retells, i'm all eyes.
It coughs out a driftwood on whose surface speights misspelled names of kindred
as slaves. i kneel beside it, erasing the word with a carving knife.
Broken, i sing. on my knees, i sing, & in the background, hear
Harriet Tubman, & the footfalls of seventy matching pass me--
their cottoned injuries leaking
sugarcane juice as they trail freedom, breath-borne, towards the orange sun.
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Martins Deep (he/him) is a poet based in Kaduna, Nigeria. He is a photographer, digital artist, & currently an undergraduate student of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He is a Pushcart nominee, & a Best of The Net finalist, '22. His most recent works have appeared—or are forthcoming— in Magma Poetry, Strange Horizons, FIYAH, Barren Magazine, Lolwe, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, & elsewhere. If he's not out taking photographs, fantasizing reincarnating as an owl as he sniffs the pages of old books in a room he barely leaves, he's on a newsboy hat tweeting @martinsdeep1.
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