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Excerpts  From  'Praise  Song  for  the  Gravediggers'  || Octavia  McBride-Ahebee

15/6/2019

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Picture


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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