1619/White

1. I knew, but didn’t know—extent, sprawl,
continent-wide bird with great shadow-wings
hovering over a whole nation’s knife-opened birth—
talons and curved-hook raptor’s beak coming
for my heart, which is history,
which shields itself and hungers
as though truth were a flock of season-following geese
from whom I choose how many to bag,
how many a season requires. So many
moments sound like gun-shot—
sound cracking the ear with its own hammer,
pummeling some dark priest-hole in every mind,
fists on doors, slammed hatches on ships,
iron coming down so hard on a deck it loses its clang,
a skull punched against echoing wood, snapped branches,
snap of a jaw-trap around leg bone.
An eagle cannot feed its young its young.

2. I discover I am of starvation, but not my own fields.
I am of fruit but have no sugar, of blood and darkness
beneath my white skin. I am product and consumption.
Un-owned, unseeing, unsold.
House and household, we have stolen stolen mothers’ children,
made other children’s mothers into vessels,
handsful of dust, broken open over, over, over.
I am none of it and all,
God forgive my blood, I am of ignorance
so large I cannot claim or colonize it.
No right to silence, have a tongue never bitten bloody for hiding,
have no right to speech, no right to silence.
My planet’s lungs blaze so high a satellite can see
and send back photographs; in another camera’s lens
one small girl, soft curls lit by searchlights’ saw-toothed beams
screams at 20 men who hide behind their hard-thick-heavy belts.
I never learn her name.
Another child drowns with her parents crossing a border river—Valeria.
Another child drowned on another shore—Alan.
I uncover my heart.
Great wings shadow it;
the great beak tears it from me;
great talons fill the cavity with sea-wrack.
My heart is a knot of frayed rope, barnacles, a link of iron chain,
still it takes my blood and feeds blood-guilt out again, stuttering.
No right to blindness. No right to fall.