For Audre Lorde
What do you say to a poet
Whose transition left us uncomfortable among the dead
Who you cross a bridge with from an island to a mainland
To find your prayer mute before a city's crumbling steeples
And could not beyond her skin share the unveiling of desire
What do you say to a poet
The world shall never see again, words giving sight
To the blind cul-de-sac of power? What, if you know what to say?
Would you say, would you write images of thought
Dissolving your particularity in the mass, like shared sacrement
Would go against tradition, and unsubstantiate the self
Into bread and blood to feed to feed the coming dread?
It is revulsive ... if I forget Africa and all her sacred meanings
But I cannot watch beauty fade before I pick a flower
It is the paradox that goes against the grain ... the shadow
Passed invisibly and left shivering at the stammering door.
I talk of shadows and substance in the recovery of essence
You carved away the shadow to make an icon of existence
And all the while our ladder of faith were words upon a page
And it was not only for acceptance, but to know the universal
Or to become again what we left so we could hate it more
We dancing in our pain, found hope yet in perennial praise
While we rose and fell into dust, for in the mortal crust
There is always this ambivalence and slipping of the truth
What do you tell a sister
When she crawls out of your mother's bed into another dawn
Who can say to us because we are dust
People from a small place are not suppose to have a universal taste
For we know brother better every mending of the broken bond
Sister, I am from a small island too
And all my life we have been fenced by only water
While were dismantling the fences that they built in skin
We have a porous boundary, many crossroads to sin
O but I would bridge me to your world again
And carry words like you to shake the bed of many worlds beyond
For it is in bringing forth our love that the mask of our virginity falls.
Copyright © David Smalling | Year Posted 2010
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