Eighteen Months of Almost
“Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes” (c. 1871/1875), Martin Johnson Heade. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.
Eighteen months we passed a handful of seeds
back and forth over the same field.
You plant it. No, you.
Neither of us knelt. The ground stayed open,
soft, ready to take whatever we gave it:
These feelings. Lord, these feelings!
Down there it was quiet. Down there nobody said
maybe. Did we long enough? Did we lose
our nerve? Or did we just look—
really look—
and find too much here.
Not enough there.
But the feeling follows us here and there!
We talked all night, every night,
then wiped the calls by morning. Nobody
who knew us knew. We must bury by night what we cannot say by day.
So we buried our love to rot.
Every season the plow struck
the same stone and turned it over, smooth now
from all that turning. It told us
nothing.
So we left the field unattended, both of us
out the same gate. Hear that. We left.
How many times had we walked to that gate
and turned back? This time nobody turned.
The road went two ways from there.
You took yours. I took mine.
Everything you planted was a lie.
Now, every night, I bury your soft words in shadow;
in the wrong hours they come up green.
I will have to let them grow,
though I am afraid of how far they’ll spread.
I will have to die a little:
let this acre of me go fallow, let the furrows stay,
so anyone who walks the length of me will know:
Something grew here once.
Something came close to harvest!
Aishat Babatunde
Publab Fellow 2026
Aishat Babatunde is a Nigerian writer and PhD student in comparative literature and intercultural studies at the University of Georgia. Before graduate school, she worked as a journalist in Nigeria, where she reported on arts, culture, and conflict. Her works have appeared in Sprinng and Mid-American Review Blog. She is interested in movement and memory, the emotional life of cities, and the uneasy intimacies between home and exile.