Audre Lourde
I have been a man
for a short time
beware my hands,
I know love
Lessons
My father’s lessons
fell to my bare feet
like rain on my back
my childhood impermeable
Paranoia, his morning,
and all it seeks to extinguish
This bright white light
welcomed me into the world,
my mother’s inheritance.
I shaped their hands,
this body of clay
read the furnace at my feet,
there is no place in this world for a coloured man.
Anxiety is a mistress
It wakes me in the night
in sweats of delicious fever
that my dominant hand
may fall off the bone
that pulls me to sleep
that steadies these letters
that pulls another to sleep
Give into the night
and restore the hand
that waves in the sink,
could carry a gun,
or compose the lips of another
the rest is forgiven
so long as nothing is learned
and fall back asleep
The Summer of Unlearning
Not a single black soul
not in my neighbours below
or across the balcony
The grocery, a walk
served by black women and men
sell meat without bones
The bars are loud
while the black drivers wait
for white women and men
who’ve had enough fun
The strawberries I eat every summer
are now too expensive
picked in a similar silence
all so vibrant
and of unparalleled colour
Consciousness gives meaning to itself
Who
My soul is an occupied people
and these questions, an army.
The Last Frontier
While the biggest part,
the whites of my eyes
are not responsible for perception
only to limit how much light
is allowed to pass
and to give other men
reason to shoot
Taste of Guava
Whatever words they used
to describe their love
for this world
was taken from you
Secrets unpacked over millennia
trying to maintain one violence
and solve another
was taken from you
Arms that were made
to reach overhead
and pick from eden
have to reach for something else
that costs you very little
that comes wrapped in loud plastic
and sits on your tongue
like a memory