Joemaria Umana

I DON’T KNOW HOW TO WRITE ABOUT BUTTERFLIES
WHILE MY PEOPLE ARE DYING

After Hanif Abdurraqib’s “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This”

I’ve been told to cradle language like an egg,
to hold it the way a boy I saw at a shanty village
cupped a moth in his palms and called it a butterfly,
because the word is softer on the tongue.
But every day here, something ugly
makes a glorious entrance. There is a swarm,
the color of a monochrome rainbow, following a call of a rot.
I follow it to death lying beside a lagoon. There is nobody
to claim the dead, as it is common with bodies like this.
How do I finesse a metaphor from this like light
from the pocket of night and call it morning. Please do not ask me
for petals or wings. Do not ask me to make this beautiful.
I won’t know how to lavender gory with glory. If there’s anything
here worth writing, it will be the stubborn breath of a people
who refuse to disappear, the quiet defiance in the way we wake
each dawn and gather ourselves from the wreckage of yesterday.
Perhaps this is our only metamorphosis, not the delicate miracle
of becoming, but the brutal grace of enduring. And if someday
a butterfly does find its way here, if it dares to land
on the cracked windowsill of this life, I will not write
about its beauty. I will write about its confession, how it came
to a place like this expecting flowers and found instead
people still learning how to not die.

Back to Issue XV…