 Aminata Holds Us All Aminata, always wearing a sacred lotus behind her ear told me as she entwined with weavers’ precision the temple hair of Indian girls into my New World head view -a luminous batch of premenstrual hair, color 2B streaked with a girl’s rage long and ancestral blue with fury for having to repay with body, however dead, an old god’s eternal debt- Aminata told me as she chewed on licorice root the way my Big Nanny chewed her Red Man while rocking her disappointment on her Raleigh back porch, told me how she crossed the Sahara in a boubou yellow with appetite sheer enough to seduce wandering genies into numbing her body with storytelling so the furies of the desert – its inferno and its frigid cousins- would not abuse her body demean her into drinking her own piss Aminata whispered as she greased the sorrows of my scalp how she fled with her escorts, ambition and purpose, -they- dressed to the nines in voluminous clarity trimmed with Venetian trading beads she fled the old order of her world that just kept breathing while all the time barren she fled in grace, in henna-stained feet, in a pair of flip-flops open to the world no track-dogs sniffing for blood this time just another kind of beast Ode to an Ordained Stutterer For Sonia Sanchez ancestral midwives induced a prolonged, unsparing delivery of your words of the progeny spawned from the left of your imagination words too intrepid to announce themselves into the soft, lumpy arms of prosody words too ambitious to be unbraided into the lushness of small talk seditious words too extravagant to roll with ease off a tongue unless with fighting gloves these sage-femmes saw the feet of your ideas first toe-tied, luminous, promising a packed kick Holy and in the wisdom of their birthing protocol informed by the cravings of warrior girls on the move without shields and charms crisscrossing landscapes choked in bereavement your words were pulled with delicate intent so when they arrived to meet the world clinging to afterbirth and relief and pummeled alliteration Holy bloomed your words were ready to take aim. a poem for gabby on monday the school yard swelled with hysterical enterprise spawned by you. limbs, l o n g, root-like, a kaleidoscope of browns catapulted by your example, depaved belligerent asphalt; their mounts and dismounts forged new greenbelts -4 inches wide-flanked by spotters of white sage and fennel. these uniformed girls and boys abandoned in the bottom of the national vault h bro e l o s g k o e i vaulted h into a humid morning, into 180 degrees of protracted splendor. All three poems are part of author's latest poetry collection-'Praise Song for the Gravediggers'. For more from this author please follow her on- https://omcbrideahebee.squarespace.com/ http://omcbride-ahebee.blogspot.com/
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