When You Return Poem by Padmore Enyonam Agbemabiese

when you return from home
we’ll spent several nights
searching for something in us
to write a poem about the willowy trees
and weed-choked lawns at home

we will talk of the sneering leopards
said to be on the streets and don’t forget
those rambling stories that make Blacks feel
incomplete— fragmented—with no punctuation

we will spur down forgotten roads
comb forests on hilltops and haunt fjords
for toothaches that windswept dawns
into nightmares across the ocean