The last free Wight man lives with me. I’m nomading the earth’s face, never comfortable sediment, sand at the edge of the deep sea, its breach.
Cutter craft jumps from Jersey to Guernsey to Wight. Prosaic, picking up a tote, too heavy a swivel-case. I land following footsteps. A dark man, player king who’d shift mass and archipelagoes, dying a foreigner ages before my birth.
I find myself as he was, the sole Black person in this whole small plot. I find myself soon —holding my chest, treading to this unbeknownst summon, as ancient chorus:
At the dock the shadow of a tree is flat on a bleached building in isle. The small trolley, trundles to a tiny residential museum, someone’s place, a legacy, whom I didn’t know. This little tract guides me to wander, custom out of place.
Why does my clavicle heave now? Unusually heartsore by the small excavation, crypt diorama of the way back then. Grief for Arwald. One who, like mine own, recalls
whom his ancestors idolized. Combat cries curdle blood-sodden ground made hard mud I tip- toe, tracing. Romans see over and over come to lower him in penance. They bring salvation, kill power —he knew— their sanguination pyre in Wight’s new wounds.
Arwald keeps supplicate and with the sword. King, I got close to sobs, Phantasm, yore prowess, still radiates this grave-size haven.
My self’s center feels heaviness of your veins, these chambers. The room within rhizome of red corpuscle, the oxygenating breeze, this turf of echolocation in artery. Memory tends to reverb-walls. Your unheard sounds shake my upper trunk.
Now in my bit of house, in a borough jotting, my eyes fringe your resound piety, you’re uttering: “My God, more than my person.” Your knowing cloaks thews as all
the knives pierce you together.
The last thing you see, as endemic protoplasm embeds stone, who’s carrying off your sister, her name unknown. She, Persephone of Wight, womb of their first
dynasty. Yes. I shudder at this too, Arwald. Centuries of my myriad mothers know her wails.
Used with the permission of the poet.