In the end there was nothing, just the preciousstones of Uganda scattered acrosshectares of suffering, the illegal gold mines inTiira stacked like bad odds against widowedwomen and underage children. I walked throughthe mines, accompanied by photographers, takingpictures, freezing suffering inside cameras likefishes trapped in ice. How far does this sorrowstretch? Where does it end? In what universe isthe light placed at the entrance of the tunnel?Point me to it, point me toward tenderness, I keptscreaming. Yet I was pointed to the girl in tatteredclothes who stooped like surrender before a ditch,whose hands, sifting the precious mineral frommud sang the song of a child left to fend for herself.I want to be in school. I want to sit inside the mouthof knowledge and sing. Survival led me here. Survival left mehere, she said. The void in her voice more palpable thantouch. Somewhere in a country across the sea wherethere are tall buildings made of glass and another people’stears, a woman will walk into a jewelry store demandingfor this girl’s sweat—draping it over her neck, staring into amirror in search for beauty. There’s no explanation to this.The world works the way it does not work. I walked out ofthe mine, holding in my eyes the sight of a girl carrying the heftof the world on her back, wishing only for the noiseof a school bell.
Tiira
We say that’s not how the world works as if the world works.—MAGGIE SMITH, “In the Grand Scheme of Things”
Feature Date
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
Reproduced from All that Refuses to Die by Michael Imossan by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 2026 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Michael Imossan is a Nigerian poet and editor. He is the winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African poetry, 2024. He is the author of the poetry collection, All that Refuses to Die (University of Nebraska Press, 2026). He is the author of the chapbook The Smell of Absence (2025). He is a recipient of the PEN international writers’ grant. He is a Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellow at the university of Wisconsin-Madison.
Lincoln, Nebraska
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets
All that Refuses to Die is a poetry collection that interrogates the present conditions of Africans through a historical lens. Michael Imossan moves into historical spaces such as museums and sites of enslavement, touching artifacts that hold meaning, and asking, Where was Africa? Where is Africa now? And what has changed? The Biafran War that claimed three million lives, though declared over, still has its lingering effect on Nigeria and Nigerians. Congo, though free of King Leopold and the exploitation of cotton, is still not free of other kinds of exploitation, nor is Uganda. Though the slave trade has ended, African bodies are still found in the Sahara Desert and in the Atlantic Ocean.
“What is impressing me about Michael Imossan’s work is the manner in which he is negotiating multiple ‘influences’ and compulsions as a poet, for these manifest themselves in his lyricism and his engagement with a personal narrative of self and self-identity as well as his own wrestling with the influence of tradition. It is telling that were we to list the personages that appear in his epigraphs and, to some extent, in his allusions, we will understand Imossan to be fully ensconced in contemporary world literature. And yet we will also see the extent to which he has become immersed in the varied milieu of contemporary African poetry.”
—Kwame Dawes
“Michael Imossan is a capacious poet. He shows us how a heart can take in an entire continent and spread it as love to the world. His collective heart is perhaps the most interior heart and most true.”
—Fady Joudah
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
