April 7 and 8, 2025
Fell asleep after selecting a poem for Monday. Sheesh.
Yesterday I had the greatest time hanging out with my daughter, drinking coffee and looking at pictures of the babies, talking about everything from spooky books to delicious danishes to the problems of the world we could fix if only we were in charge. When I got home, I meditated; I usually meditate when I need to calm my soul, but for once I wanted to see if it would make good feelings last, surround me like the warmth of a bath. While I was meditating, I remembered this poem by Joy Harjo (which I first read in An American Sunrise, published in 2019).
Granddaughters
I was a thought, a dream, a fish, a wing
And then a human being
When I emerged from my mother's river
On my father's boat of potent fever
I carried a sack of dreams from a starlit dwelling
To be opened when I begin bleeding
There's a red dress, deerskin moccasins
The taste of berries made of promises
While the memories shift in their skins
At every moon, to do their ripening
Today was a weird day. A big unknown has been revealed, and while it changes little, it changes my story, or at least what I’d decided my story to have been. I feel a bit as though there is a departure happening, but the journey is already over. This poem by Idrissa Simmonds comes close to putting into words a wish I’ve had. A wish too late, but still. I found it on the Poetry Foundation website.
Flight
I call to ask my mother the name of the street where we bought the suitcases when we left
Brooklyn. A better question would have been how did it feel to be sliced from the rib of Pine and
Loring and sent, like a kite, up North. Or tell me what your mother said to you in her grand rear
room the night we left, seated on the edge of her bed in her nightgown, muted in the low light.
So many bellies in the house. Cacophony of kreyol and Brooklyn buk and sweet sweat across the
walls. Did she tell you to follow your husband. Did she tell you anything about us. How, above
all, you should keep us anchored to here, where the distance between comfort and safety is
measurable by the length of the hallway, the distance from one room to the next. The rooms, like
capsules, each with its own medicine for Black kids. Or, tell me what you wore on the plane
ride. I only remember what I wore: stockings and Mary Janes and the pink knit pleated skirt. I did
not remember this was your first time flying, a grown woman over thirty, and you had never seen
how small the world looked beneath your feet.