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.
Copyright © L'Nass Shango | Year Posted 2009
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