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I believe there is no such thing as a healthy individual without community or culture, and no such thing as a healthy community or culture without ritual.

You think it’s enough to wait all morning
for snow that never comes while up
in the atmosphere flakes drift for hours

without touching the ground.

I’ve been struck by the immense beauty in the communities I have been a part of, both in Nigeria and now in Canada, as well as grieved by the levels of hardship. The motif of the garden, which I explore in my work, has become a place for me to sit with this contradiction.

This one was here with all his roses. He was from a big family in Jamaica. They didn’t have much in common, except for their difference.

He took me fishing as a teen, lecturing me about boys, the proper way to chase them, and the proper way to leave if they needed leaving.

It’s a basement full of cobwebs. Mice and dust and boxes. One is filled with letters in his language, and another night, before he got on a plane to identify the body of his father, he told her of those letters.

It’s almost summer, and soon she will go to the fields with her father and her sister, catching the bales as the baler spits them, and she will lift and stack them.

War … / makes machines / whose metal eats more metal and spits its out and on / and on, and never enough, and always far too much.

Give me proof, said Thomas,

and he could see a hole in the palm before him,

and inside the wound a glimpse