MARK FERREIRA

This body is a book.
And in my head I can hear
the voices of ancestors:
they’ve already spoken richly to my genes.
Left their ironies and paradoxes imprinted there.
The voices of my ancestors are nightmare voices,
insistent, untranslatable.

They want me to remember
what part of my body came from the Caribbean.
What part came from Africa. Spain. The Canary Islands.

 

They ask me: when a nation fights a war
are those battles imprinted on the DNA of the survivors?
What screams are encoded there?
Battle plans, moments of heroism,
a young soldier pissing his pants . . .
which moments become part of the collective memory
to be translated into proteins,
effecting the shape of organs,
thickness of marrow,
location of heart valves,
brain circuits,
patterns of sleep?
What does peace mean in this context?
Don’t we tear holes in the wind itself
when we make war?

 

These are my talkative ghosts:
manifestations of the past,
acting out old patterns, tugging on living flesh,
inept and weak, but there, very there, very right now.
History acts on us like big magnets,
like time’s fingertips.
A slave’s impulses, a leader’s perspiration,
a buried son, the color of a flag—
nothing is wasted. Everything is recycled.

 

I ask my ancestors:
Who had my face before?
Who shaped my brain?
They laugh.

They know I carry my nation’s tragedies with me.
I sing its anthems.
Its coastline mirrors the shape of my back.
I know the laughter and faces of my people
are encoded forever in my deep spaces.