Still, Resilience

On the night of 14 April 2014, exactly 276 female students were kidnapped from the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok, Borno State, Nigeria. The Jihadist group, Boko Haram took full responsibility.

Called back for their Physics final
the girls return

with their sharpened pencils,
no one wanting to fail,

no one able to imagine
anything worse than an F.

In the imagined classroom,
I watch the students

take their exams—
heads bent over small desks.

Teaching across the border
In the pink earth of Niger, what did I know?

How could they know
anything beyond their assigned

problem sets, too intent
on memory to hear the slap-drop

of worn boots, smell
bitter dust rising around

the armed boys who appeared
more like lost extras

from an independent slasher film
than soldiers of Boko Haram.

And how did the girls react?
Did they spiral down

the stairwells holding their slender
blue notebooks?

Or were they so intent
on their hopes, our hopes,

that they simply kept on writing—

*

Susan Rich is the author of six collections of poetry and co-editor of two prose anthologies. Her recent books include Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry). Susan co-edited Demystifying the Manuscript: Creating a Book of Poems (Two Sylvias Press) with Kelli Russell Agodon and co-edited, The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders (McSweeney’s) with Ilya Kaminsky. Her other poetry books include Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue–Poems of the World, winner of the PEN USA Award. A winner of the Crab Creek Review Prize, Times Literary Supplement Award (London), and a Fulbright Fellowship, Rich’s poems appear in the Harvard Review, Ploughshares, VQR Online and elsewhere. Birdbrains: A Lyrical Guide to Washington State Birds is forthcoming from Raven Chronicles Press. Blue Atlas was a Finalist for the Washington State Book Award.