Vanishing
I give you my rain,
the verbs and clatter from which there is no returning.
I give you my siren, my hymns, my psalms.
I give you maps, the crevice from which my cities have fallen.
I give you the small country of my laughter.
I give you lights parsing through lives, the fleeting
moth of days, my hours of beseeching.
I give you my private animals.
I give you the night hours from which I wake a city of salt.
Poems excerpted from Death Does Not End at the Sea by Gbenga Adesina by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2025 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Gbenga Adesina
Gbenga Adesina is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He is the author of the poetry collection Death Does Not End at the Sea (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), which was long-listed for the National Book Award.
Adesina was the 2019–2020 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.