The Debt

I have the blood of the conquerors in my veins

and the blood of the enslaved and the slaughtered,

so where shall I rest with this

mixed river of blood painting my heart—what city

wants me, which woman will touch my neck?

Nigeria is sleeping in the angles of my skull

and maybe two small French towns—

one in each leg—are also sleeping, and of course,

the first people in this land, with their long

black, black hair, seven of them

are napping along my ribs

And with all these people

adrift my body, I am asleep as well—

dreaming their good wishes, their strained whispers,

sleepwalking all over America.

But it’s alright, in my country,

everyone is asleep: at the wheel, on the job, even

with their fingers on the trigger, asleep

with their distant continents, the glittering

silence of their shattered histories

and the long pull of a thousand

thousand moons inside them.

They don’t remember

how once we swam inside our mothers, that

once our mothers floated inside their mothers,

just as their mothers once waited inside those

before them and before that it was the same—

all the way back to the first mother

in Africa,

that slim, short, quick-tempered woman

whose children crawled all over the planet,

then got big and started

hurting each other—with the conquerors

in their bright armor, trying to finish everything.

I know where the blame falls. I know

I could twist my brown skin, my mixed nations,

my kinky hair into a fist. I know. I know.

But I hear a stranger music in my bones—

the windy shimmer of long fields, a quiet of birds

stunned by dusk, the singular tree of all blood

rising, the future awake singing from these wounds

and what is the lesson of history, if not

that we owe each other more bread, more

friendship, fewer lies,

less cruelty.

Source: 1992