In The Sun

a good poem to me is like food when I'm starving

you're poetry

a book battered and burnt

but still legible

i read you

your skin is fragile parchment full of stories of your past

the tattoos on your neck are new

a rose choked by its own thorns

a dead man hanging from a noose

i read you

black boy i can't love. black boy i can't have. black boy i can't call mine.

i found your book buried in the ashes of an old fireplace inside a haunted castle

i brought you home with me into the light where you don't need to hide

behind tattoos, behind thorns, behind costumes of monsters

like you, i used to be starving too

but you,

battered, burnt, blue black boy

fill me

i read you all summer long

right here

right here in the sun.

Adeola Carew is a writer and poet from Sierra Leone.