The food I ate in Italy deserves a litany of praise.
An art unto itself, it satisfied so deeply
I expected to rise each morning cured of hunger—
forgetting hunger, like longing, is a ritual.
I was too aware of my freedom— / the taste of summer in my mouth,
and sun on my nakedness. / I did not recognize that same light
when he rose to meet me. / Or did I? Is that why I ran?
For giving voice to slavery’s strangled cries, Just dig for his lost words, stitched in the loam— Under red roots… between white alibis— Patterned in clay, the fossils of each poem
When I was young, after my father died,
I sometimes longed to burrow down, and sleep
inside my mother’s womb, where I could hide
within my life-source, cradled in the deep—
Our house clocks stopped the day my father died—
at three, the very hour that he passed.
No catch of shifting gears, no pulse defied
his absence. Time itself mourned him…
(I have been born inside him, too.) I am
my mother’s goldfinch, thistle-eater of
her womb. I sing her blood’s music, enjamb
the sounds her heart and breathing made above
my new ears…