Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets' daily poetry dispatch. Read “darkening with song” by Adebe DeRango-Adem.

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darkening with song

By Adebe DeRango-Adem

                                                 after Du Bois’s “The Song of the Smoke”

                                                 set to the tune of Dante’s Inferno (Canto III)

listened to the pain my messenger

 

foraged in the darkness my candle

 

fed my grief well my cure

 

took care of my suffering my mercy

 

pranced in my raging my blood

 

found my devil my god

 

wrang worlds awry & darkened with song

 

abandoned all hope at last

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Copyright © Adebe DeRango-Adem

Adebe DeRango-Adem is the author of four full-length poetry books to date. Her last collection, Vox Humana (Book*hug Press, 2022), won the 2023 Raymond Souster Award. As of 2024, her poem “Song of Sheba” can be found on Toronto buses, trains, and streetcars, thanks to the Poems in Passage program.

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