It’s harmattan. And somewhere, a tree has fallen.
I am going home with the bark as a proof for my son,
twelve, who wants to be a plant in a foreign soil.
I agree: his father’s land is too dry to be tilled.
How do I tell him he might not have the space to bloom?
At home, he is watching a movie in which a black man
dies the death of a cockroach. I pat him:
“Son, this is what happens in your dreamland.
And at the border, there is a thousand percent chance
that your skin would bounce you back here.
I, too, once pictured myself overseas, apple pie in my mouth,
serenading the name of my lover which I hoped was Pearl-Kayla.
Son, I am speaking from history –  what my history teacher
failed to tell me, I read in the farmer’s book:
the black forest was cut down, and the land given over by chance.
There is a cut down on black skin, on black history–
It is by chance too, if anyone, today, crosses the border,
without being mauled or cut down.