Elijah Elvin
Where is time spared to make change?
Is it as seconds become less & less & not many,
in a reach for life that is so minute yet so fickle?
Or will it be before our skin turns to grime–
And doomsday’s vessels trickle?
Shall we be the weak that forever stays shorter?
Squashed in months of squalor–
Where their dozens lay besides misery’s mortar?
Is it trapped on the shine of coined glare
inside a broken street meter for Sunday parking?
Or does it fade as shame’s shadows start barking?
My feet pound pavements
with dogged strength
over bus-broken crosswalks.
Every phone call with Mother
feels like a prison visit.
My eyes salivate as my lips dilate
to the smells of home.
Bonswa bonswa Èske mwen ka
jwenn kèk mwayen diri nwa
wi wi men pa gen dan ok
Kite m’jwenn yon
mwayen Mac ak
fwomaj tou
Epi plat bò kote m ‘yo
pral yon ti griot, ti
bannann, ak ti legum
Greasy fingers
in cheap napkins
revive me
with a moment’s relief
from the yelling news:
Constant unrest
back home.
I open the biggest container
to see a twenty-year-old love
drenched with cloves.
How are my people
so deaf but headstrong at the same time?
Elijah Elvin is in his junior year at Weinberg, with a Black Studies major and a Creative Writing minor in the Poetry Sequence. His poetry tell distinct stories that each reveal what it’s like to be Black, Caribbean and American all at once in the past, present, (and future) with influences stemming from the Bible, Black art, and being raised in New York City.
