A Border That Keeps Following Me: Poem By David Yambio
- Refugees in Libya
- 32 minutes ago
- 3 min read
No one has ever shaken my hand
without feeling
broken borders
inside my palm.
No one has ever looked into my eyes
without discovering
an entire continent
within them.
Everything can be silenced
except the memory of a human being
who survived death
more than once.
Everything can be hidden
except the shadows
of destruction left
upon the soul.
Where can I hide you,
dear Revolution?
When you walk through my blood
like an African fire
burning outside history.
Where can I conceal you?
When foreign airports
remember my name
more than my country does.
Where shall I go with you?
And where will you take me?
When every border
remembers my face
better than friends do.
We are exposed to the world
like a rubber boat
in the middle of the sea.
Visible
like a Black body
floating beneath the
moons of Europe.
No one has listened
to my speeches
without understanding
that my anger
is not merely political.
It is the anger of a child
who learned too early
that the world
knows how to grieve
but not how to change.
No one has entered my life
without discovering
that prisons
do not easily abandon
the people who survive them.
No one has searched my memory
without finding
electric wires,
iron doors,
and a sea
still swallowing faces
beneath the speeches
of civilized nations.
Teach me, dear Revolution,
how to sleep
without counting the missing.
Teach me
how to love life
without feeling disloyal
toward those who died
trying to reach it.
Teach me
how to speak of freedom
without the dead
returning between my sentences.
Speak to me democratically,
Dear Revolution.
Too many men
have arrived carrying your name
in one hand
and a rifle in the other.
Too many mothers
have buried their children
for promises
they never lived to see.
For I no longer know
whether freedom requires
so many funerals.
I no longer know
why our rivers
must run red
before they are allowed
to run free.
The world lectures us
about democracy
from buildings
our minerals helped construct.
It praises liberty
while swimming
in the wealth beneath our soil.
And when we rise,
it asks us to pay
for our freedom
with our bodies.
Let Africa breathe
without first teaching her
how to bleed.
One where the child
Does not inherit
The battle field.
For I am tired
of victories
that arrive in cemeteries.
Until we can agree
upon a way to
change the world.
where freedom grows
from human life,
and not from its destruction.
Take your hands away
from my scattered dreams,
my recurring nightmares,
and the fragile nights
when I try
to become an ordinary human being.
It is unreasonable
to speak forever
as though I am screaming
from inside a prison cell.
It is unreasonable
for the sea
to continue living in my throat
even after survival.
Sit with me for a while
so we may reconsider
the map of this world.
Sit with me
until we understand
why some human beings
need a thousand documents
to prove they are human.
Sit with me
until we decide
whether borders
were created
to protect the exiled
or to teach them
where they do not belong.
Sit with me
until we find
a way to resist
without becoming
another grave
waiting for justice.
David Yambio
29 May 2026
Inspired by Nizar Qabbani’s “A Woman Walking Inside Me.”
In tribute to him, whose voice taught generations of us how to speak to what lives inside us.