Beach

Hussain Ahmed

Away from the water,

I led soldiers in prayer.

There were no tags on their chest,

and no ranks. I have seen them before

or maybe they were healers

in God’s many faces.

Unmarked graves

in the military cemetery—

a gully in a garden of sunflowers.

We shook hands after the prayers,

two weeks ago,

I woke up to the demise

of a friend who was down on typhoid.

He was there too,

in a caftan I never saw him wear

before I left home.

I called his name one last time,

he answered—surprised

there’s a catalog

for dead things in my mouth.

On a hallowed grassland,

I kept running until my legs disappeared.

The beach may be encroached then, but now

we stand in perfect rows before sunrise.

Naked on a hot bank of a salted water,

history will recall this moment as moderate and deadly.

It is the first of such—

proximity of grief and beauty.

The skin continues to glimmer,

smeared with shea butter.

Wet air will blow off the sea,

and the tides will continue to fall any time they hit the rock.

Translated from the Yorùbá