“I praise no nation.” — Ilya Kaminski
to the country running behind my feet
cupping its hands to trap my butterflies
& break their wings
those travelers of a world
which knows no border
the grief you left in the wingless butterfly
was so wide it could sink a ship
I didn’t know
being born in some places is a life sentence
until my friend said
the president is so cruel his speeches
remind him of borders
I had a dream
I was a citizen of the sky
until a man died in police custody
and his country denied the international community
from carrying out its own investigations
this is how
a thousand old men
opening their rotting mouths
tiptoed back into the prisons they built out of silence
now they hide their conversations under the roof of the night
a cloak of invisibility which
the city puts on
to survive the chopping of wings
which my country is set to do to all flying beings
Alain Jules Hirwa lives and writes from Kigali, Rwanda. His works appear or are forthcoming in Wasafari, The Carolina Quarterly, Lolwe, Jalada, Praxis Magazine’s Through the Eye of a Needle chapbook series, Welter at the University of Baltimore, and elsewhere. He is starting an MFA in Poetry at Texas State University.