from Bakandamiya

II

Home is always calling. Singing with the mouth of all things 
             I have taken for granted. What I want to erase

from the past is pain. But how else will future learn
             the taste of joy? First, I tune my ears to the sound

of water tumbling from a hillside,
             and the nimble bird, a hammerkop, pitching for fish

into the encirclement of a river
             weary from its own meandering quest for the sea,

some call it a large mere, I call it a stagnant song,
             I call it time’s boundless canal, walled off by its own echoes.

But then I travel
             on a road that leads only to one’s self.

If you draw a lamb on the ground and
             say the proper prayer, it will bleat.

If you sing the proper song, it will dance.
             And if, like a rope, you hold on to memory,

the past will never be lost to you.
             Climbing onto the branch of any tree,

my mother could see into the future.
             Said grandmother could do so while sitting

on a mat. I have looked from a hilltop, 
             I see nothing but blur.

Godfather said my feet are too rooted
             in the present. The moon is sullen

like a bad ball,
             surly with the stolen light of sun.

We were here
             before there was sun,

before there was anything beside the emptiness 
             of this universe, continuously stretching

its own fat—all that stardust, all that expanse.
             How am I supposed to see the damp earth and not dance?

I do not want to crumble under the weight 
             of obligations, its heavy concrete

pressing to my chest, as I lie on the ground, 
             bones crushed back into clay,

into the porter hands of God. Is there a euphoria 
             to being bested? What joy is there to sap

from the bosom of defeat? Finally the delineation of song, 
             a clearing space of immense, immense sadness.

Read more from Issue 22.2.