Praise Song

After she died, I’d catch her
stuffing my nose with pine needles and oak,
staring off into the shadows of early morning.
Me, too jetlagged for the smells a ghost leaves behind.
The tailor of histories,
my mother sewed our Black Barbies and Kens
Nigerian clothes, her mind so tight against
the stitching, that in precision, she looked mean
as hell, too. My mother’s laugh was a record skipping,
so deep she left nicks in the vinyl.
See? Even in death, she wants to be fable.
I don’t know what fathers teach sons,
but I am moving my mother
to a land where grief is no longer
gruesome. She loved top 40, yacht rock,
driving in daylight with the wind
wa-wa-ing through her cracked window
like Allah blowing breath
over the open bottle neck of our living.
She knew ninety-nine names for God,
and yet how do I remember her—
as what no god could make?

Copyright © 2023 by Hafizah Augustus Geter. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 18, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“This poem is a first step towards my second poetry collection, ‘Desiring Machine.’ Inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the same name, in which desire is a productive force and not just a site of lack, the project of my second collection is to look at what desire creates. Praise songs, as a poetic form, have a long history in African traditions. They attempt the impossible: to fully express the spirit or soul of something or someone in language. This poem considers grief as a type of desire, and the work of moving through it as a kind of transcendence. After experiencing a period of grief so long that it felt like a casket, I resurrect my mother’s essence from the grave, and, through language, return her to her original form—a wellspring, a birthplace, a woman of possibility.”
—Hafizah Augustus Geter