The Green We Left Behind

by Saheed Sunday

Riccardo Lo Re

sometimes, our keyboards know us better than our heads do. the time i knew living comes first before loving was when my autocorrect changed my “i love this world” to “i live this world”. meaning, you learn to live first before you learn to love. meaning, both don’t co-occur in one sentence. meaning, it is either you leave to love or you love to live. the end result is that the choice is always yours to make. it is the same way every chicken that scatters my grandmother’s grave reminds me often. of the choice i made to stomach eggs and feathers at christmas. my dad said there are more things to worry about other than that. he says to worry about how much our sunglasses had made us forget how green the world was. i said what’s green? he said green was a color in the world his grandson — my son — may never get to see.

my younger sister is eight, but she knows about everything that unmakes the sea. sometimes, i wonder if she isn’t growing into the doorway of a storm; into the mouth of the earthquake that might sink the tomorrow she has always been promised she would see. the truth is that we all have our thumbprints on the body of our own doom. like how every single time i open a car door means i’m poisoning the earth. forensics said Miami was the first to die. forensics said Osaka was the first to sink. a neighbor said we are safe in africa. as if we don’t live on earth first before we live in a country. as if when the earth gets browned, it will handpick its doom by the color of our skins. as if when the earth gets warm, we will be protected by the skins of our forefathers that had drowned in the sea. as if we hadn’t cut down trees and replaced them with our homes. as if the storm would call us by our surnames and refuse to wash us when it realizes we are black. so this time around, before the storm claims my body and make me a landmark in my son’s memory, I am recounting my steps back to all the green we left behind.

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Saheed Sunday, NGP V, is a Nigerian poet, a Star Prize awardee, a Best of the Net nominee, and a HCAF member. He is the author of a poetry collection: Rewrite The Stars. He was shortlisted for the Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award, Wingless Dreamer Poetry Prize and The Breakbread Literacy Project. He has his works on Lolwe, The Deadlands, Shrapnel Magazine, Rough Cut Press, The Temz Review, Brittle Paper, Poetry Column, Off Topic Publishing, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. In 2018, he was shortlisted for the Wole Soyinka International Cultural Exchange. He can be reached on Twitter @saheedtsunday, or Instagram @_saheedsunday.