The Mediterranean remains blue across centuries of swallowing.Because it is not a cemetery, it does not date its memories.On the sky is a diary that catalogued the bodies lost to the sea.In the language of a gong, water clashed against the rocks,an elegy to the fish that embalmed our dead inside their cold bodies.After the new millennium, I learned to forget what I cannot save.A seed vault was built outside a deserted city—obscured with grief,I searched for familiar faces from the shadows on the walls.Now, every song in a foreign tongue sounds like a prayer.
Blue
Hussain Ahmed
Feature Date
- February 15, 2025
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“Blue” from BLUE EXODUS: by Hussain Ahmed.
Published by Orison Books on July 2, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Hussain Ahmed.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Hussain Ahmed is the author of Soliloquy with the Ghosts in Nile (Black OceanPress), a 2023 poetry award honoree by the Society of Midland Authors, and a finalist of the Luchei Prize for African Poetry. His second collection Blue Exodus (Orison Books) won the 2022 Orison poetry prize. He won the 2024 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize and the 2024 Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest. Ahmed’s poems have been featured or forthcoming in The Nation, The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, A Public Space and elsewhere. A Nigerian poet, and environmentalist, he holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and is completing a doctoral degree from the University of Cincinnati.
"Quietly searing, Blue Exodus is a revelatory book full of incisive declarations about grief, ancestry, and exile. Expressing both the sayable and unsayable between line and spacing, the poems are material artifacts that evoke a particular history, while deconstructing its silences. As an archive, the collection itself refuses to locate memory in time, but rather outside time, in people and places, including the sea which 'is not a cemetery, it does not date its memories.' [...] Blue Exodus is a beautifully rendered meditation on belonging and faith, loss and survival, that no one should miss.”
—Chelsea Dingman
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