In the Beginning

IN THE BEGINNING

six children jump Double Dutch in autumn

rain, and the ropes’ helix is a seventh seeing.

It opens and closes like an eye-

lid and through its quick-fire lens the smallest

child jumps. Rain in their hair, their bare feet

slap concrete church-rhythmic

as tambourines. I watch the child keep time,

then look past them to the other side

of the rope twirl’s wet eye, brick tenements

cementing my seeing to an ancient memory

this game turned gate-into-history creates.

Was it the Door of No Return beckoning return,

or the doorway to my grandmother’s mind,

her stroke-stunned body stripped of words

yet heavy with language: blink and cry, her hand

tight around my hand, the hospice dizzy

with slow minutes? Her moans cradled both

curse and confession. And those children,

the Beneficent’s right hand, sing with the words

my grandmother lost, a rhyme to heal

the days in the whoosh-clack of their twin whip

turned so fast it whistled, their feet escaping

in place. Mercy. Even the gods run

home in stillness, tossing up a spiritual

to greet the falling rain: Down by the river /

down by the sea / you came to find your Savior /

but instead you found me waiting for

the song to end, the shrill voices

ringing like biloko bells to trap me there

in the ropes’ wet pupil shown through to the end

of knowledge where there is no slack, where language

breaks into molecule and memory, skin as percussion,

the glint of diamond in a dope boy’s grill, my own

tongue fit for Babel, a fool’s end, an end

to one million sins in a single night, the end

of confession of silk of need the day’s end

ending at the ropes’ ends. End of breath of sound.

Words drop like seeds to this hard, wet ground.

NOTES

“Final Poem as Request for Maskot [ . . . ]”—“They sure do love them some Black pain” is quoted from Morgan Parker critiquing this peculiar hunger of white editors. For Al Jolson.

“Order of Events”—“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” is from William Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 2. The “Shadows” referenced in the poem are the AAI RQ-7 Shadow, an unmanned drone used for reconnaissance by the U.S., Australian, Swedish, and Italian militaries.

“Tabula Rasa”—The shirt in reference is a reconceptualization of the shirts created by Randi Gloss for GLOSSRAGS, where the names of those recently killed by police are printed in bold white letters on a black shirt so that we will always remember their names.