AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling


  • Home
  • Bio
  • Novel The Twisted Circle
  • Behind the Scenes Twisted Circle
    • Making of Novel
    • Creating the Setting
    • The Characters
    • Selected Research Resources
  • Novel Under the Tamarind Tree
  • Behind the Scenes Tamarind Novel
    • Making of Novel
    • The Characters
    • Creating the Setting
    • Selected Research Resources
  • Blog
  • Short Stories
    • The Jumbie Tree
    • The Ole Higue
    • Masacurraman: The Legendary River Monster
    • Rescued: An Easter Story
    • Ester's Letter to Santa
    • Sly Mongoose: Caught in the Jim Jones Web of Deceit
  • Poetry Corner
  • Featured Poets
    • 2025
    • 2024
    • 2023
    • 2022
    • 2021
    • Brazil
    • Caribbean
    • United States
  • Haiku Poems
    • On Being Human
    • On Climate Change
    • On Inequality
    • On Children
  • Contact

POEM "LEVITICUS" BY UGANDAN AMERICAN POET HOPE WABUKE



HOPE WABUKE is a Ugandan American poet, essayist, and critic, born in the United States of Ugandan refugees. She is the author of the poetry collection The Body Family (Haymarket Books, 2022) and the chapbooks her (2019), The Leaving (2016), and Movement No. 1: Trains (2015). Her memoir Please Don't Kill My Black Son Please will be published by Vintage Books in winter 2022.


Wabuke writes literary and critical criticism for NPR and has also published widely in various magazines. A former contributing editor for The Root, she introduced a column on African diasporic literature. She is a founding board member and former Media & Communications Director for the Kimbilio Center for African American Fiction.


She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Commission, the National Book Critics Circle, The New York Times Foundation, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers, Cave Canem, the Awesome Foundation, Yale University's THREAD Writer's Program, the Poetry Foundation, and the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA).


Wabuke currently serves as Poetry Editor for Ruminate Magazine, and is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.


She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.





For more, please visit www.hopewabuke.com.



LEVITICUS BY HOPE WABUKE



at work still when the day rises

again sunlight dipping into your hollowed ribs

you are not eating


grey-haired man my teacher my dark mirror of what

I want & do not want to become

how I have watched you

want me different


genetics will win you are a scientist you have told me


morning last

I found you at your work

house so dust-coated

I could not breathe

the deer eating your overgrown grass


what does this make us

your children

when your work is

the only thing when you cannot hear

the words we hurl against the shuttered window

that is your life




LEVITICUS BY HOPE WAKUBE continued



please take care of yourself


that day we found you in the street fallen unconscious

eyes blooded shut

nose so broken you could not breathe &

you would not get help

how you said


if I am going to die from this I would

already be dead


the door to your office closed behind you &

we could hear the chirp of your computer more alive

than the drone of our voices

asking you to try







SOURCE: The Body Family: Poems by Hope Wabuke, Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2022.