Conversations with the Sea

How do you dress the wounds of history, or stitch the scars

of a race whose ancestry you have swallowed with your tides?

How do you perform this litmus test over again, where the redness of a people’s

ancestral blood flows in your veins while your surface is an endless blue.

How do you rinse death’s salty taste off the walls of your tongue? Is there

a country buried in your waves for the ones who never got to see theirs anymore?

The bodies scattered at your banks, are they cashiers or fishes in their pools

of blood? Do the boats ever grow sea-sick from running over the dead bodies

in your grasp? Why do your waves rise and fall like wings? Would it be 

the voices of dead black souls fighting to not drown beneath water?

I come to you, knowledge-thirsty. Believe me, I have tried to bleach these burdens

just to lighten them but I guess no messiah’s blood can wash black skin white as snow. 

If what we call a sea-storm are my ancestors making peace with history

in your belly, then I come to you, with mouthfuls of prayer,

that I may sleep and wake in your arms, a salty offering tracing her way

to the undug grave of her forebears because this too is home for the unhoused.  

*Poetry Translation Centre & Book Buzz Foundation Project