Daniel Abukuri
Where Do We Bury the Lute Boy?
My work often explores the silences between grief and memory, the tender and sometimes brutal ways that language tries to hold what disappears. In “Where Do We Bury the Lute Boy?” I wanted to write through the fractures of war and loss, using music as both metaphor and memorial. The poem listens for what’s left behind, the sound of a song that cannot be finished, the ache of survival that asks to be named. Across my poems, I seek to translate absence into presence, crafting spaces where beauty and sorrow coexist, where silence itself becomes a language of witness.
Tales from the Queue
Heaven Santiago On Daniel Abukuri’s “Where Do We Bury the Lute Boy?”
When I came across “Where Do We Bury the Lute Boy?” I was immediately pulled in by the beginning two lines, “There’s a boy from Deir al-Balah / who once sang with a lute carved from pine.” The piece is a fragmented mythic folklore woven in tragedy, with a fantasy-like quality that immersed me into the speaker’s war-torn world. As the piece unfolds, a sobering reality begins to emerge as each caesura bleeds in silence and implied war violence. I was impressed by the storytelling as I read further into the piece, especially with the innocence of the boy shining throughout until his tragic demise, only amplifying the loss and gravity of the piece.
Abukuri uses the lute as an anchor, balancing music and memorial to create a layered narrative.
The stanzas, packed with visceral and beautiful imagery, shift to a more horrific and gruesome atmosphere as they move from “He played it on rooftops” to “Do we wrap the arm separately?” There are several elegant lines such as “before the sky turned against him” and “drones coughed in the clouds.” I hear, see, and feel the chaos, sorrow and longing the speaker describes in each moment. It is a beautifully somber poem that stuck with me long after reading.
There’s a boy from Deir al-Balah
who once sang with a lute carved from pine,
not store-bought, not strung to perfection,
but shaped by a father who hummed
while chiseling memory into music.
He played it on rooftops,
as drones coughed in the clouds,
and his sister clapped along
until the sky became glass shards
and everything soft turned to rubble.
Now, the boy is silent.
His right arm buried under what was a kitchen,
his song still warm in the mangled strings.
A rescue worker pulls him out,
half of him missing, the rest barely holding.
What is a song with no fingers to pluck it?
What is a boy with no breath to sing?
In Rafah, questions are lined up like graves:
Do we bury him with the lute?
Do we wrap the arm separately?
Do we tell his mother he asked for her,
or is that mercy too cruel to speak?
His name was Kareem.
He liked sweet tea and drawing birds.
He wanted to be a pilot once,
before the sky turned against him.
The imam’s head bends, a crescent collapsing.
No prayer carries enough syllables
for a child’s unfinished song.
So we bury him with his left hand
clutching a stringless lute.
We bury the silence beside him.
Daniel Abukuri (he/him) is a Black poet and prose writer from Ghana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Transition Magazine, The Malahat Review, Minyan Magazine, A Long House, Protean Magazine, The Adinkra Projects, The Literary Times Magazine, Wildscape Literary Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, NENTA Literary Journal, Consilience Journal, The Poetry Lighthouse, Lotus-Eater Magazine, Twin Flame Literary, and elsewhere. He is a Best of the Net, Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, and BREW Poetry Award nominee; first-place winner of the African Writers Award (Poetry); winner of Poetry Archive Now Wordview 2025; a finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize; and the fourth runner-up for the African Literary Prize. He was recently longlisted for the Renard Press Poetry Prize and is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow.
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