Broken

Shards Fracturing light No rainbow Visible to the magnitude of eyes No depth As a bowl to catch the sun No scooping Of pictures from this emptiness Nothing but splinters Scintillating brilliantly On a flat surface Of soil. When we were young And I had not left as yet The mornings Where you wait for me I do not recall I ever saw a grain of sand alone Beach or sand bed Piled before becoming The mortar for the stone Each grain Was so individual and so belonging Where they were swept up By wind, human shovel Or just lying this place of origin Invisible The umbilical of our kinship ties. I saw it then The butterfly swirling in the sun As if idle to my eyes What does a child understand Of life's deep meaning The sugarcane taste Of life's deep mysteries? Women by standpipe or river Together, always together Washing, telling Days old discretions Men in their collective Bond under trees Or in the sour bars of rum Boys in bushes Coming out like stars On golden beaches Clustering like bees Around the ball Around the picture of a girl Provoking the meaning to speak Together, always together The village rose And fall as one Something more than waves and soul Something defiant And beautiful in the sun. Shall I sweep it away now My life here Not shown in a looking glass again Nothing whole is whole The splinters in the flesh Are parts of pain How it could have fallen from my hands The lost of it Rend me in parts deeper than carelessness Only in a mirror Can we tell the whole Present truth of memory.