The Yam Reflects

On this day, during some tough year, 
I was born from simple soil.

Red clay. Ocher dust. No forefather. 
Only my overworked mother named me.

I was found in a basket of wild grasses. 
My vine and tuber secretive, curling.

I, this yam, wish to remain whole. 
I, severed root.

Find me, this severed root, waiting 
not for hand or tool but more root.

Sun washing over like silk. 
Each day in this life like the last.

How it feels to be made new every day. 
Like a perpetual child, someone always

covering my eyes and quizzing, 
Who are you? and Which are you?

Mistaking me for some other, that one. 
Plucking from me my hair, peeling from me

my skin, as if courting response, error.
My shape the shape of some strange organ.

I am only ever courted, or so it seems. 
What to do in a land where even your roots

are in the shape of something else?
What to do with what’s always made unfamiliar?

Who could they think I am, being so far
from what could keep me grounded?

They might think I am home,
as my first layer of flesh resembles

that of any other. Problem is
not one person gazes deeper.

To know what is eaten is of the land
of the people forgotten

of the people we too eat
and look away from. O Home,

you seem only a filmic concept about
the taste of your own dirt, and then not even so.

Quick, look away, here come the ethnographers
touching my rock-rough exterior.

Working my body. Dusting earth from my eyes. 
Peeling me back and back. My flesh appearing

first familiar, first safe, first known. 
Then hued darker, each layer darker

until the easy parts of me 
have morphed into the name

for another darker thing, a simple yes 
for a vote, a paltry sugar cube,

a club to the head, a life in a gutter,
or a root snatched from the first plantation

on which the first tale of creation
was misspoken, out of which Reason was born

so now each new American tale 
is never too far

from bruise-purple, never too far 
from black.

Read more from Issue 23.1.