Was it all simply adornment,
watching the rain fall from the sun,
or the mourning dove that carried
the wallet-sized photo in its beak?
Looking back, it was true—
I had stopped seeing the beauty in it all,
living from moment to moment,
looking to be granted some small sense
of pleasure, as if by respite or charity.
It was true—I was afraid to speak honestly
about the distance between desire and what
is enough, about the kind of trying that comes
from wanting to grow together and the kind that comes
from wanting to free oneself from apparitions.
My love, loneliness is terrible—every
moment spent walking through the graveyard,
thinking about all the things you’ve lost,
all the things there are left to lose. There are beautiful things—
the desert sky just before sunrise, the light of the stars
and the waning moon, the late autumn stillness of a pond,
the way that, sometimes, when making love,
or at war with one another, the greater truth
would hover just above us, like a halo.
One can see now why I value stillness,
considering our relationship
to natural disaster. These days, I glorify it,
perform my daily rituals like vespers.
I watch a rock pigeon land on a cafe
table. I watch the people seated at
the table begin to laugh. I watch the bird
shit on the table. I watch the people’s faces change,
and I watch the bird—feeling lighter,
freer, less encumbered by it all—fly back
to its nest on a rooftop across the avenue.
Yes, love, it’s always been true—
but it takes time to change your heart.
Kwame Opoku-Duku’s poetry and fiction appear in The Atlantic, The Nation, POETRY, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Yale Review, and other publications. Kwame lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is at work on his first novel.
