Poetry: Granite
By Majekodunmi Oseriemen Ebhohon
A man is leaning against a wall in Central Havana,
not so much supporting the building
as participating in its long, slow conversation with gravity.
He is wearing a pair of shoes held together
by a complicated arrangement of rubber bands and hope,
an engineering they don’t teach at MIT
but which seems to work fine for crossing a street.
You might think a person would eventually wear thin,
like a bar of soap or a favourite tire,
after sixty years of the world’s largest thumb
pressing down on the top of his head.
But the friction has had a curious, reverse effect;
it has polished the bone into something dense and cool,
a substance that doesn’t show up on a sonar map.
He watches a pigeon land on a headless statue,
noting how the bird doesn’t care about the name on the plinth
as long as the stone provides a steady footing.
There is a quiet, geological patience in his stance,
the look of a man who has outlasted the rain
and is now just waiting for the clouds to apologize.
He takes a slow drag of a cigarette,
the ash hanging on by a single, grey thread,
refusing to fall until he decides it’s time—
a small, vertical victory in a world of falling things.
* Culled from ‘A Country That Refuses to Go to the Junkyard’, and dedicated to our beloved people of Cuba. We think about you and the struggle everyday. We offer these words as a ‘thank you’ for the solidarity, medicine, the literacy, and the refusal to break. We shall overcome!
