Later and always
we must speak
of their splendor
(those of us who nurture and honor them)
and of their destinies—as
we admonish against
casting their beauty to the
undeserving
or
neglecting to be
self-beloved
forgetting
fierce selfhood
ancestral inheritance
ontological
imperative—that
they are answer to
first questions
and
fates of nations. . . .
Before that
we must exalt them
as they begin to fathom
the power
of sure bodies and brown grace
to allure
and
frighten
and know a power that seeks
to suppress
their own
out of craving
and
sense
of defeat.
Yet first
we must catch them
with gentle hands that guide away
from
giddy danger as
elastic with happiness
they balance
big grins and
delicate necks
eyes
gleaming
in the neon
glare
of rejection.
Let us remind them
of the ripe core
of their own divinity
as they taste
the world's first offering
of un love.
Their Voices Drawing Her
She recalls the punctuation of refrains—
(I do declare... No! You don't say...)
phrases drifting down to sprinkle
thirsting girlhood (What'd they say?)
nuances of disdain or praise, prescient-
pitched, sage motherwit, tutelage
she soaked up—and resonant strains of laughter,
or what they sealed into snuffed tones of pain
before shooing her out the room,
as something irrefutable, ineffable
and stashed, sacred, inside—the stronger pull
he'd pulled them from.
She felt their voices drawing her
toward some place she longed to fit.
More than cadenced code among sisters,
more than savored rumor singsonged
(Now let me tell it...) The well deep-
plumbed, pump primed, they'd have
just this time to be unguarded, easy
(Unh, unh, I know that's right!)
The circle, a play-ring, a womanspace
shaped round by talk. The faint cool there,
summer-fan-stirred breezes
and the almost-muted soap operas beaming
bluish grey. Their crackling shouts and
hummed assents warming, she'd stay
hours if they let her, under the eaves of that table,
and listen, enthralled by mothertongues.
Then suburbia suspended them in an amber
of new paint and window gleam. He'd found
a house so far away it shatttered solace into echoes
in the bare space of that wilderness, its uplift
of brick and siding miles from the women who'd
raised them—mother, then daughter. Their queries
confined to phone lines, soliloquies. None of their heat,
or grit, or sass to enter there, advise or succor or tease—
(Womanish! but, Lord, I was too...)—only what she gleans
from that gulf of years of glowing words.
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