Red and Yellow Light Over the Top of Houses | Dolapo Demuren
In one of my student’s essays on Hamlet,
the father in the introductory paragraph
is dappled, like a boy with daylight sewn
onto his chest. Like a boy with daylight sewn
onto the back of his arms. The student writes,
before Hamlet’s father was a ghost, he was all
of the leaves around Denmark, he was red and
he was yellow. He was on Hamlet’s roof, fallen
from the trees, the student writes. I remember
when I found my father fallen in his office,
his voice raised like a child whose address
is written on a slip of paper in his breast pocket.
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about the author:
Dolapo Demuren (he/him) is a Nigerian-American writer and educator from the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. His poems and other writings are featured or forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Prairie Schooner, The Maine Review, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland College Park.