Taking the Oath

TAKING THE OATH For those who are born again through the Oath of Citizenship at the Onondaga County Courthouse, Syracuse, New York! The morning prayers over the neighbor’s car cold, the ride to the court house quiet as snowfall, the city enshrouded by a gradient of gray between the darkness of dawn and a day without sun The oath would be simple, something sacred and short, syllables of English welcome as the script that conveys the Qur’an, once harsh-sounding words now the potent poetics of opportunity at hand She will be Umm Almaliti, an American name in a Dar-es-Salaam, as portable as the infant asleep in her arms She will work with her husband, send her children to school, dark brown and Berber, the mothers of their mother from The Rif and The Atlas, the enduring dynamics of water and stone and mountains that murmur of hawks on the wind, the fathers of their father from Granada and Sevilla through the dye-makers’ guilds and the sinuous medinas of Fez and Meknes Hand on her heart, she knows the gift in her life is not the promise of eternity with a rough desert deity who lets the nervous ulema be afraid of her face and the lay of her hair, but the courage to run quickly toward the uncertain miracles of a precarious life in a place with few rules on this scary blue diamond in this corner of space She is all the new people who come to this land, the music of hope on the breezes of faith She is all the new people who ever come to this land; she is a needle of light, another fragment of color in a reckless mosaic unique on this earth Emanuel Carter