Look there, the last brick fell and toppled over pebbled ground,
‘That last sound, was it a rumble or a quake?’
rolled over peony stems, plucked daffodils matured through last spring,
‘The heedless aloe vera survived.’
came resting under the orange tree, fruit greener than woodbine leaves,
‘Why did you have to stretch so far?’
That shaded view,
Godly,
‘Unjustly,’
summoning false sirens down
crested mountain slopes, down
bushy trails hiding rattle snakes
‘the murderous vipers, all of them,’
winding round the fence and into ‘your’ terracotta windows
‘how the sully muddied that crystal blue.’
And as for gleaming waters atop peaks,
which ‘you’ had no business
seeing, wondering, proclaiming
natal songs thumping over chest drums.
As if they could see me,
‘as if they could want you.’
First ‘you’ left the door ajar,
then ‘you’ propped a chair,
unhinged from its walls.
I staccato my eyes to the horizon,
‘This watery mirage?’
blurring roots and tugging at new growth without serenade.
Are the bright nothings under the sun shining or scorching waiting for a never-coming shade?
‘No saviours will come down this hill.’
There is no use of saving
the last house standing, when
its walls are as thin as the bark of
that meddlesome blossomed tree.
Lisa Sammoh
is an African diaspora writing from Vancouver, Canada. Her works, featured in the Kalahari Review and iö Literary Journal, and elsewhere, touch on the intersectional nuances from back home.