When you have been
at war with yourself
for so many years that
you have forgotten why,
when you have been driving
for hours and only
gradually begin to realize
that you have lost the way,
when you have cut
hastily into the fabric,
when you have signed
papers in distraction,
when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.

(Joyce Sutphen) 

via Ian Morgan Cron

My death says: One bird knows the hour and suffers
to house its millstone-weight as song.

My night watchman lies down
in a room by the sea
and hears the water telling,
out of a thousand mouths,
the story behind his mother’s sleeping face.

My eternity shrugs and yawns:
Let the stars knit and fold
inside their numbered rooms. When night asks
who I am I answer, Your own, and am not lonely.

My loneliness, my sleepless darling
reminds herself
the fruit that falls increases
at the speed of the body rising to meet it.

And my child? He sleeps and sleeps.

And my mother? She divides
the rice, today’s portion from tomorrow’s,
tomorrow’s from ever after.

And my father. He faces me and rows
toward what he can’t see.

And my God.
What have I done with my God?

People have been trying to kill me since I was born,
a man tells his son, trying to explain
the wisdom of learning a second tongue. 

It’s the same old story from the previous century
about my father and me.

The same old story from yesterday morning
about me and my son.

It’s called “Survival Strategies
and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation.”

It’s called “Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,”

called “The Child Who’d Rather Play than Study.” 

Practice until you feel
the language inside you, says the man. 

But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used? 

And me, confused about the flesh and soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you? 

You’re always inside me, a woman answered,
at peace with the body’s finitude,
at peace with the soul’s disregard
of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart. 

If you don’t believe you’re inside me, you’re not,
she answered, at peace with the body’s greed,
at peace with the heart’s bewilderment.

It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening

called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,”

called “Loss of the Homeplace 
and the Defilement of the Beloved,” 

called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs.”

It’s interesting (and funny) the difference between two days
And the ways within that
Sad then happy (or the other way around)
Happy then sad (or no other way to say it)
Accomplished or bored or otherwise left thinking about
Nothing
Or something grand.

Worry turns to apathy
And I forget how to feel (or think, whichever I do)
But remember yesterday and the day before?
And childhood?

I forget.