pitter/patter
(for a.g., you & yours)
the night is silver in its silence
moon-pop echoes of the day
raked up rubble of the hours spent
my, the children slumber
a thousand tomorrows bubbling at their lips
the dream projections lighting up
the clouds’ ample cotton relish the silence
as you’ll relish tomorrow
and the honesty of such raucous noise, thick
child feet of our unfeathered breasts, beasts we cherish
hallway run, sprints to smash the mash of food
tumbling, rolling right into these arms
charmed in their amnesia regarding where one
begins or ends
reminding us of the joy
of first step and the storm after the holler:
mama see, mama watch
pitter/patter
pitter/patter
thunder on a hardwood, heartbeat
this sole and counted rhythm
every generation a temporal fugitive
running from the death grip
every death ship’s watch, yesterdays
we weren’t meant to make it through
relish the memory ingrained in the sound
how these tiny, tiny feet
grip the floor, say
tomorrow, tomorrow
I make you
tomorrow
Copyright © 2019 by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 21, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.
“In conversation with dear fellow poets, I found myself working to name a future-to-come that children represent as a kind of escape from the death-bound trajectories that remain integral to settler colonial temporal regimes. This poem considers how the everyday sound of young children awake and alive in their day is also the sound of generations not only having survived, but of future world-building possibility. If to be subjugated as racialized and queer bodies is an imposed/intended condition of "no-future,” the minuscule and fleeting joys of young bodies in becoming and flight, stumbling across a living room into the loving arms of family, whether blood or built, is no small thing: a moment teeming with so many possible futures, alive and brimming over.”
—heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes’ debut collection The Inheritance of Haunting (March 2019, University of Notre Dame Press) was chosen by Ada Limón for the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize.