Poem a Day in Translation Muqabalal

Stefanescu’s After Moving Back to Alabama is a harrowing poem. It gallops on bewilderment and rituals.

When we tell people we love them, do we intend to love them without their past? What question does our love beg to answer?

It is as if by choice the persona of the poem brings back their family to a place they once lived, just to introduce them back to a past they had on that Alabama soil, the red dirt that made them.

I love you is the most unoriginal thing to say to each other, yet when we say it, it feels like it's never been said before. It is a different kind of blizzard we want to be part of without questioning God. We can feel a snowstorm of emotion by just hearing someone we care about telling us they love us, but can we gift each other our shame, our crooked past?

Love documents a history of scars suffered by a forest because an axe was allowed entry.

Stefanescu evoking the natural world, dashes us to a spring of emotions, asking from us what we can make of our attachments, without actually asking. Almost as if the poem is careful enough to not tell, but to show.

Here we have been shown. Please stay tuned as I bring you this poem in Igbo and English, while A'bena presents it to you in a motley of languages — French, Fon and English, as a tribute to everyone who grew up in a multilingual home.