Freedom

It would try to lisp a dumbness sometimes—

the language of welts rising slowly on the panes,

a cracked blur of riot-torn air,

confused which year it was.

The last time it made a sound was when

it crinkled on its way into a bin,

a great plot of justice. I wasn’t born, then;

my father was.

It must have been whole once,

for you could still conceive it like a dream,

a gloriously illegitimate thing, though;

until a country was torn out of its heart one day

and you saw its impaled ghost in the moon.

My grandfather told me we had slept so long

with a flag over us, we couldn’t run when

machetes poked us awake amidst still-dreaming heads

rolling in the streets like marbles struck in game.

There was nowhere to go and we went nowhere,

with its face slumped on our backs

and history books that said what had happened is the past,

until sixty years later, a community’s threats betraying

her voice, a poor nun requested me

to leave my month-old job in a convent

where I’d studied since childhood.

I keep trying to find its shape in photographs, old letters,

the wind of stories trapped in some cancerous throat, dying ...

a tattered roof in the stars, a tent flying off

with meanings barely gathered into a heap.