by Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
The mower’s teeth are sleeping in the shed.
Today, I pull weeds by hand,
small murders of green, roots snapping like bone.
Mockingbirds jeer from the neighbor’s elm.
I don’t speak. I owe the quiet something.
This house has known too many names,
some given kindly, some carved in spit.
My hands remember more than they tell.
A bird coughs up another bird’s song,
cardinal, jay, the screech of a door.
He is every voice but his own.
I envy that. I also don’t.
I used to believe stillness was sacred,
that Sundays should wear white gloves.
But the Mockingbird knows the holy
is also a mouth wide open.
Somewhere behind me, the garden softens.
Tomatoes lean into their bruises.
The hose coils like a question.
I do not answer. The bird does.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri is a Ghanaian poet and prose writer, and a 2025 BREW Poetry Award nominee. His literary work has appeared in Lolwe, Eunoia Review, The Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, Poetry Potion, Spillwords, Poets for Science, Writers Space Africa, Poetry Farm, Wingless Dreamer, Parcham, and elsewhere. He won the 2025 Nocturne Ash Dark Poetry Contest, was the second runner-up in the Lipstick and Gunpowder Poetry Contest, a finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize, and a two-time shortlisted nominee for the Goethe-Institut’s Young Creative Writing Lab. He is the author of the poetry chapbook Petals of Love (2021), which is shelved in Better World Books, Waterstones, Bol, Worten, Omero, and Coupang. Find him on Instagram @poetraniel.