A Miracle

By Dolapo Demuren | From Prairie Schooner – Spring 2025

Explore: Poetry

Your eyes have their own clouds now,
and bifocal lenses soiled with salt and oil.

You’re correcting my math again.
Equations and figures loosen

beneath your explanations, your silences.
Everything appears. Answers come

out of places dim and invisible to me.
You don’t even need to fog and wipe

your lenses with breath, to see more
clearly: father, you remember—

remember seeing for the first time:
a toy carousel busy in your hands,

the grimace of a tyrannosaurus,
remember the gaze at a fizzle of cider,

grandma pouring cool water over
pounded yam, her head asleep

the last time, her cornrows warm—
your eyes blurry, your eyes gleaming.

Dolapo Demuren received his BA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and an MFA from Columbia University. His honors include fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Academy for Teachers, scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and nominations for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is the associate director of the Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House.