Like Precious Okoyomon’s visual works, living installations inventing new lyrical ecosystems, this poem begins with love and then offers a landscape. The scale of the body aligns with the cosmic. History also appears, with its wars and cities, its incendiary character, its memory of ashes. The feeling has substance. Darkness has a speed, and movement (floating, being, flowing, breathing) unifies this poem and its world. Selected by Anne Boyer
The world is breaking into flowers the breath of things
By Precious Okoyomon
Our love is an instant forward blue sky
Every dream is a moment of freedom.
Happiness floating over the void
The echoing darkness cannot be bound
is always being born
ash in hand
Myths arise where it is placed
knowing that there is fire
Knowing that there is war
cities that rise and fall
A small flowing black river
the speed of darkness
Everything burns repeatedly
Back to the umbilical tongue
To the vesicles of the present breath
swallow bits of tenderness
come back to earth
anna boyer He is a poet and essayist. His memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. lovely okoyomon is a Nigerian-American poet and artist living and working in Brooklyn.
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