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.