I am always searching for something dark & holy to overcome me
Eternity: you say it is always time for blackness. Kali,
Mary, Billie, Birmingham, Charleston. You came
before the light. Before a God particle. Before
time began as our sense of time. Kali,
Mary, Billie, Birmingham, Charleston. Our saints
do not differentiate
between a disease
& a miracle. So neither
do you. Like the Lady
Day to come, you craved
a true love, fidelity
across lives. Kali,
Mary, Billie, Birmingham, Charleston. You love
that word: promise. Nine
months is enough to imagine a future. One moment
is enough to fear a revelation. Kali,
Mary, Billie, Birmingham, Charleston. Behind
a pew, fire is a first witness. You sense
only after the burn. In truth, you had never
been barren. In your prior
lives, you had Spirit through you. This life
you never feared a stillbirth
or a miscarriage – unless it was
of justice. Kali, Mary, Billie, Birmingham, Charleston. You never feared
fires rising from churches, black
bodies blackened.
You think of strange
fruit & eerie graves, how
a nation can yet be at war
with a destroyed flag, how a body
can yet ache to breathe, how everything
passes through the channels of a woman –
that which is destined to save
or to destroy – sometimes both
in the name of the one
you didn’t even name.
In each life, we all bring a little bit of God
into this world. You enter
the black night, prepare
yourself as a mother
of the universe.
