A World of Daughters

Say licked clean at birth. Say

  weeping in the tall grass, where

    this tantalizing song begins,

  birds perched on a crooked branch

over a grave of an unending trek

  into the valley of cooling waters.

    The soil’s thirst, lessons of earth

  unmoor the first tongue. Say

I have gone back, says the oracle,

  counting seasons & centuries, undoing fault

    lines between one generation & next,

  as she twirls sackcloth edged with pollen,

& one glimpses what one did not know. Say

  this is where the goat spoke legends ago

    in the ring of fire to deliver a sacrifice.

  To feel signs depends on how & why

the singer’s song puckers the mouth.

  Well, I believe the borrowed rib

    story is the other way round, entangled

  in decree, blessing, law & myth. One

only has to listen to nightlong pleas

  of a mother who used all thousand

    chants & prayers of clay, red ocher

  blown from the mouth onto the high

stone wall, retracing land bridge

  to wishbone. My own two daughters

    & granddaughter, the three know how

  to work praise & lament, ready to sprout

wings of naked flight & labor. Yes,

  hinged into earth, we rose from Lucy

    to clan, from clan to tribe, & today

  we worship her sun-polished bones,

remembering she is made of questions.

  No, mama is not always the first word

    before counting eggs in the cowbird’s

  nest. It begins in memory. Now, say

her name, say Dinknesh, mother of us all.