How often does one get invited
to read her poetry while sleeping
in a suite on a bay?
How often does my Iyeeh in her stubborn
spirit, come back to me with palm nuts,
boiled in honey, sizzling in dehdee?
How often does Bai Jabbeh’s blessings,
spewed at me as a child come back
to me in a poetry visit?
Most days, I am housed in small hotels,
small towns, cliffs overhanging
like webs of spiders, where the attendants
speak English no one understands.
Where they do not know my name
or see me, and often, my poetry
takes me down small villages

of old houses, of people who have never
seen a Black woman calling herself
some kind of poet,
and they stare at me as if they’d just been
visited by a wild ghost from Africa.
All those ghosts of our ancestors
that did not survive the Transatlantic
journey, our ancestors, thrown overboard,
chained leg to leg, arm to arm,
one human body to one to one to another,
and buckled down on hard filthy boards.
All those ancestors still trying
to swim their way to freedom, trying
to find their lost bodies, swimming back
to Africa, a return they have been wanting
for four centuries now.

Back to villages where their spirits
were snatched from their roots.
Today, I am baffled to be the only torchlight,
even though I’m barely a light.
I am unable to carry this light, to be the link
to the Africa they will never meet
on this side of their bodies.
Last time I was on a bay, it was the blue Pacific,
but the Pacific has never met my ancestors,

has never seen the ghosts of our mothers
beneath the sea. The Pacific does not speak
our tongue, cannot even hold
the conversation in a thin line.
But a bay on a lake, a cold water place,
and Iyeeh is coming along with me
to hold the void between me

and all our ancestors, those beneath the sea,
those whose spirits hover over us,
leading us homeward.
I will need Iyeeh to stand between me
and this other world, even if she is only the wind,
only thunder in the wind,
only the power that makes an ocean roar,
only the legs upon which
a lake rests its body.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by el alce web on Unsplash