I want to tell you

by Babo Kamel

祥晨 孟

that the sun’s humming this morning, a tune from long ago summer when the percolator kept time with a dream unfolding, each pop a call to join the day’s jazz and those early hours emerged soft, like the sound of bullrush in breeze or the chimes of church bells, that time in Blanc Sablon when one by one the doors of the shingled houses opened like momentary invitations and the townsfolk converged along the one dirt road, greeting each other to the coastal morning their voices harmonizing in the comfort of belonging. Those months in hospital, all you wanted was music. Tell me, Brother, do the dead simply stop listening? Can you not hear your name singing through the wind?

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Babo Kamel’s work appears in Greensboro Review, Lily, CV2, Poet Lore, and Best Canadian Poetry 2020. Her chapbook, After, is published with Finishing Line Press. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson’s Program For Writers. Her book, What The Days Wanted, is published with Broadstone Books. Find her at babokamel.com.