Because I Do Not Walk the Dead, the Dead Walks Me by Aliyu Umar Muhammad

for Grandma, late Khadijah Alfa Muhammad

& one day it began with stars mourning on the palms of sky
Night shielding us. Us, shielding the night so it may not fall

& crash a brother’s collarbone. One day I’d shoot myself
Into the wind & refuse to let my body fray into fire songs

Played at funerals. My mouth is a harp & I chose not to play the song
Because song is the size my brother bore on his chest

Like cross. Because his body was a shattered glass
& I, picking up pieces of a loved one I never loved. It all began,

With حتى زرتم المقابر: ‘until you visit the graves’ – & we did
But because graves are silent corridors opening our wounds

Into the doors of resuscitation, half my brothers slit into mourning
& forget themselves between throat of prayers

& predicament of roses. But because death has no metaphors,
We soliloquise our mouths into what gives elegy a simulacrum

& because we walked the dead & the dead are planted into Eden,
My body exists on mornings that weigh down all the beloved bodies I’ve never met

& because love is ghost beaming on lost shadows, I’ll evoke love
If through the wind, a body like mine migrates to the sea once swallowed by desert.