“Sea Stories” by Jide Salawu
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Sea Stories” by Jide Salawu, from Contraband Bodies (NeWest Press 2025), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Raymond Souster Award.
Sea Stories
By Jide Salawu
From Contraband Bodies
I have no stomach to keep sea stories.
Ten thousand boys are crossing
the black Atlantic without life jackets.
In Thiaroye-sur-Mer, hundreds are wading
through the butane eye of the Mediterranean,
flailing in the brine.
I confess there is no hierarchy
of those rushing out of a countryโs flame,
hiding under the tent cities
waiting for the next blue boats
and those making fancy claims
of gratified documents, airborne dreams,
visa tracks against the furls of night,
breakaway planets, rebellious stars,
turbulent clouds, and wayward wind.
Purgation is learning the slant geometry,
the delicate curve of your country,
and demanding holiness from a land
that has always named you a fungible thing.
It is mortal then to dream of return,
to surrender to the blights of the road,
but not to the pyrrhic promise of this land.
Copyrightย ยฉ Jide Salawu
From Contraband Bodies (NeWest Press 2025), shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the Raymond Souster Award.
Jide Salawuโs writings explore the question of Black mobilities, diasporic struggles, nationhood, history, cultural identity, and socio-justice. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund Boxset (2019), and Contraband Bodies, published by NeWest Press (2026). His individual work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, The Walrus, Salt Hill, CBC, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Schooner, LitHub, and so on. Salawu is a recipient of different awards, including the Fulbright Scholarship. Salawu presently holds a Black Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is currently leading a community creative project that names, probes, and reimagines seasonal struggles in the Afro-Canadian diaspora and beyond.
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