Ancestries of Land Mines

As children we walk without hungering for old age—perfect

little gods made out of clay. Names and things bear your name

but if life is not willed, death will find you. Make clay that

hardens to hold a memory—a thing that cannot trace steps

walked is dead even as it draws breath.

Gifts. Rain. To see the world anew. Breathe wet air

cigarette in hand, sneakers in sewer ground, jeans dragging

the day’s germs home. In the dark you keep stepping

into your shadow blackened to your skin by night. As a child

in the dark, you could not mirror yourself.

III

Walking home, remnants of yourself drip from remembrances

black ink erodes your skin into the wet road, black islands

for tour guides, blind canes pointing to where you fade and die

each time you are born. Each time you die they say

they loved their neighbor. How they loved your shadows!

As a child, freedom is named after the stomach of needs

even those that we imagine. One day, when the vote first burns

in your imagination, before Soweto Passes ignite like paper tigers

you will feel solidarity because you dreamt it first

and find license to steal the happiness that once rode trains.

A train—multiplicity of symbols, departure, arrival,

whirling between worlds and destinations. Beware

of all movement. To resemble the earth is to be without

a constant face. Stand and you will revolve

to be one amongst others like you.

Love is not to be sanitized in its furiousness, beauty

is in the gutters. It travels the spectrum between

hell and the rainbow—where the God sleeps after

we birthed it. Slay it once, then again. Then find love

sufficient to hold the earth’s wound close to your open chest.

VII

As a child now half adult, moons and suns wore different faces.

When you learned to say Africa, it wore the face of your home’s

wooden planks that cried in the rain, and dried still expressions

that doves could not sing into a song. Refugee child walking along

intricate boundaries to find home in starved margins.

VIII

Landscapes of so many faces, truths of landscapes, the blues

the sukus, salsa, jazz, Lingala, the rumba—and the Tizita

all rhythms to the same step—the swish of chains against the ocean

winds. A word alone skates to sing, we remain at sea waiting to sink

an oar into the next blue wave.

The world evolves in small infinite steps. Where we don’t grow

mugumo trees in our backyards, the mirror of another grows and feeds

our children strange fruits. Refugee child learns to hold a gun

walking along boundaries without spilling into land mines of ancestry

—Nkurumah’s natural-born child soldier of no borders.

A newborn child like a fruit falls to her parents’ feet. If they don’t walk

then she must learn from her grandparents. If they too stood still

if their world was always still like a photograph, then it must trust

its infant footsteps to draw a map of Africa as one molds clay.

And unlike our god, she must learn to die for her creation.

Source: Logotherapy (University of Nebraska Press, 2016)