1
[Nsa’a- money collected from family members and
friends to help cover the cost of burying one’s dead.
Asaawa-Cotton balls inserted into the nostrils of the dead
to absorb fluids.
Note: In North America and Barbados, African women who were enslaved from West Africa were the largest harvesters of cotton.]
Mother, what have we done with earth’s flower?
forcing it into holes of the dead
and wrapping it around cold limbs
not to warm but to exchange for coins and grief.
We laugh with the white man who drags
our hands into the deep soils until we are hoes
turning the calm of earth.
This cotton pulls children out of our bellies
to chains their nakedness.
This cotton is the labor of our fingers
we hide under our beds and uncover again
to weave a dress, to cover the holes in our skin.
This cotton drives away our angels
and brings near spirits with rusted keys
to ring in our ears:
That if we wanted to be free we could stop picking,
that if we wanted to run, we could bury ourselves,
lie in the field of flowers, our burial white and soft
until water pours out our holes.
Mother, do not fear, the earth itself will drink our blood.
At the artifacts show,
outdoors, you see a drum
and touch its face,
hit it right in the middle
where the leather tears.
The red tag says $35
but the man selling it sees
that you are drawn to it
and that you want to beat it,
carry it home with you in your red van
for times when you are
in a room and the trees
are dancing without a melody
or when you are on your bed
and see how the birds
dip their necks back to swallow
light. You take your hands off when he says
$20, You want to get it off my hands?
You don’t look at his hands to see whether
he is responsible for the decay,
whether he understands that drumming
anything creates bruises
like drumming the stomach of a woman
who is forced out of her country
or drumming a little boy who carries healing
in his arms. You raise the drum,
It wears small rings around its waist
Where could it be from?
He sees that you draw nearer to it,
that you imagine things you would
do with this drum, under your armpit
or between your legs.
Whose feet have you dragged
to the dance floor? Whose soft rage have you drowned?
You beat it one more time and hear it sound
echo a song you must have sang for your people.
Some frafra woman with scars
on her cheeks and a blind baby
on her back bends to pound
clay into fine particles of pot
Does she know this is art?
Does she know she is like god?
A cloth hugs her naked breasts
All the way to her feet.
She has not touched her braids in weeks.
Her ritual with clay uninterrupted:
her fingers yielding mud to a curve
Or licking sweat off her man’s back.
