God sees me. I see you. You’re just like me.
       This is the cul-de-sac I’ve longed to live on.
Pure-white and dormered houses sit handsomely

along the slate-roofed, yew-lined neighborhood.
       Past there is where my daughters walk to school,
across the common rounded by a wood.

And in my great room, a modest TV
     informs me how the earth is grown so small,
ringed in spice routes of connectivity.

My father lived and died in his same chair
       and kept it to one beer. There’s good in that.
Who could look down upon, or even dare

to question, what he managed out of life?
       Age makes us foolish. Still, he had a house,
a patch of grass and room to breathe, a wife.

It’s my house now, and I do as I please.
       I bless his name. I edge the yard, plant greens.
Our girls swing on the porch in a coming breeze.
 

As a girl I held the hind

legs of the small and terrified, wanted

the short-fur and the wet meat furrowing.





Wanted the soft cry of the quavering

boy at primary school, rockstone





mashed up against his tender head,

the sick milk of us poor ones sucked

clean from a Government-issued plastic bag.





At lunchtime children were lethal

and precise, a horde hurling “Ben-foot”

at she who was helpless and I





waking too-surprised to hear my own

cruel mouth taunting. Her smile some

handsome forgery of myself.





Grateful, even now,

they cannot see the bald-wire

patois of my shamdom—





Makeshift, dreaming the warmth

spent in the muscle of the living,

the girl I grew inside my head dreaming





of a real girl, dreaming.

I wanted a pearled purse so I stole it.

I wanted a real friend so I let him. Let her.





Let him. Let him. Let him.





This beauty I am eager to hoard

comes slippery on ordinary days,





comes not at all, comes never.





Yet I am a pure shelled-thing. Glistening

manmade against the wall where one

then two fingers entered





the first time,

terror dazzling the uncertainty

of pleasure. Its God as real as girlhood. 

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.