Barely Breathing by Mutohhir Abdulhamid Olanrewaju


Sorrow pours from the rooms
while I, like a ghost, enter your abandoned homes,
holding my end in my hand,
sleeping and waking with my ruin.
It’s dispiriting to become acquainted
with my own desolation,
to keep step with it to this extent.

They weigh on me – these abandoned houses,
this desertion that fills your homes.

I enter their hollowed hearts, and can barely breathe . . .

Neither Arabs nor Persians nor Byzantines can feel me now.
Didn’t I ever have a history?

And how did I lose them along the way –
poems that were the world unfurling, in a moment?

And how were you lost, all of you?
You took my share of loss
and left abandonment behind,
a planet with no ribs –
you left it for me, you left it
to burden me.

If I said I was leaving
there would still be no one here
but abandonment,
with its hoarse voice that’s swallowing my own.

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