2015 Paris Agreement

by Ojo Taiye

after Gabrielle Bates & Tiana Clark

climate refugee is not poetic writing about climate refugee is not poetic. this sole word weighs heavy as my father’s name. & sleepless worry folds a village of herders, the way fire ravages the wildflowers. my little sister, writes a note she hides beside her bed in the shack. it begins, dear El Nino.

another word for climate refugee is worry. another word for worry is food ration. another word for malnutrition is cholera. & sometimes my sister is both. which is to say sometimes a girl’s body is a dove’s neck. my blood barreled through my body until there is a border on her back — child labour.

it’s April & my brother has spent a year drinking from test tubes. if the past is just a parable for the future, then staying alive should be easier — a delicacy each day going rare — the symbolism which isn’t lost on a refugee like me: there is no balance here. cattle as a species are already dying.

this heatwave, mother of our circling, the name we gave to the far side of the horizon —  sealed with bruises. i am running back & forth between the house of silence & the house of greed shouting over & over with ink-stained fingers: isn’t it only sensible to pull the emergency brake? shouldn’t we abandon this dirty energy for now?

climate refugee is not poetic is the small brightness of my mother’s shed. her arms filled with goat milk, each dark step of the way home. & my father is singing to his six-year-old daughter, thick with longing. the forecast on the radio claimed it will rain, it didn’t. for so long i wanted to give the world my eyes —

Ojo Taiye is a young Nigerian who uses poetry as a handy to write his frustration with society.