Desert Story
Photo: Parsing Eye
I am a tree with no trunk,
a smooth stump
in the middle of the
Sahara with roots
buried in the sand.
You are growing taller
the lizards say
when I try to eat the birds
flying near the clouds I cannot see.
They tell me we are the same
because when the sun didn’t rise
we feasted on stars together,
scaly brother and sister in the middle of
nowhere.
When the sun came back,
I was a full tree
with all the room in the desert to grow,
watered by the moon
and the whispers of lizards.
About the author
Khadija Ceesay (she/her/hers) is a queer Gambian poet from Olathe, Kansas. She has her degree in English literature and culture from Pittsburg State University and is currently pursuing a masters degree in creative writing. She has been writing poetry since 2014 about her racial identity in order to understand herself better and owes much of the ideas behind her work to her relationships with family, both good and bad.
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