Will Return

Whenever seconds tick astray
this heart glides into its Birth-waters.
In every slaughtering of the day
it sails in the morning rain to the place it calls home.

Many birthdays ago
we knew nothing about a landing that
will hold us suspended above our bones

Many seasons ago
When our souls arrived at the port of longing
after crossing oceans with hope in our loins 
we knew nothing about the muddy waters
or the toxic wounds inflicted by a hurricane of smiles

Today, there’re too many mournful things
to be named in a single sermon on the mount
But how to pass our songs to ancestral rivers
before time collapses in the woods
is with great difficulty

Each day we’ve seen our songs turn into germs
while our tears drowned our panting souls

How little others know about the migration of our souls
crossing oceans to ports of longings
and the stampede that baptizes our breaths
and in the midair we become clowns
chasing the Dream lost in each other’s shadows

We are still here with limbs starched to our bones
only waves of scars on our fatigued selves can say all

With no roadmap to escape from the thunder and plunder
we awake each dawn with whisper-screams and blood-tears
tucked beneath our cracking skulls

but one day, before I disappear without my coat
I’ll pick up this breath to remember me

In my dreams I rub my limbs and tell it to sparkle
with laughter on village lanes

If you meet me—A Goodnight Song to Apartheid

(for Nelson Mandela)

If you meet me sitting
Quietly, counting fingers by the moon
Like the chicken pecking bones
In the pain of winter,
Don’t think I need your tears.
 
If you meet me sitting
Quietly bathing in streams of thought
Like sad blues from the gallows
Like screams searching heaven
Don’t think I worship your name.

All these pains of drought

All these smiles of dying leaves
All these screams of a corrugated breath—
Wet blankets of colored birds
Stretching into dawns.

They are absorbing the day’s heat

They are gathering screams from the village
Laughing softly at your imperial dreams
With their hungry swords they will empty
The grief cared long by all prison-drowned souls.
 
And if you meet me again sitting quietly,
Whispering words on the back
Of the Wind don’t think
I’m roasting dreams
I’m claiming the sky like a Bird.