the streets can’t help but sing our names back to us. it
sounds like a
Mother’s Union choir rising out of the mango roots, a well
geysering with love. every tanty’s voice was a procession orchestrated
to keep the block stone-still, to remind us of when the
lapels would plot
to kick the dust out of the pavement, to paint it chaconia
by
at least six-thirty, to write the words SOMEBODY
CHILD in chalk, certain
of the justice of wild and swinging pain. i remember when the whole gang
of boys on my block come to see the ancestors off, our
mothers and the leaders
of every mass muttering under their breath, Lord, make sure to take them in,
the streets are a frigid region. we sing every name, craft
Johnnie flambeaux, the
ice boxes burst open with juice and rapid comfort for the
aches, we slap hope
against we thighs to keep the rhythm as your granny dance
in the kitchen to
the sound of your father’s name. all of us boys remember
the night we get
our mother scared the first time, her writing our names everywhere, whispering it like a national
anthem into the corners of the house, hoping the bricks
would lend us support
sometimes my brother would venture outside our garden’s
edge into the
castle that the past had built to store the children that they
didn’t plan
to make soil of right away. he would stare at it for hours,
try to
pull loose bricks out hoping he would destabilise
the wall, say he was just making sure that all of the
spirits got free. he said he hoped they swam the whole sky above the country,
that nothing kept them still but their mothers. he and
the others wrote the names of the men without children,
put
the papers together as kites, let the wind take each by law.
every evening he found a new one, gazette paper abiding,
he made sure the evening got all its forsaken citizens
before our mother called us back in
for dinner. And he’d eat like for all of history’s harm’s
done, he let some names live forever, in our mother’s way.