Yesterday, I went to two online events that inspired the poem below. First, my friend Yasmine invited me to a Nichiren Buddhism conference and then I attended Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative’s black/water: The Digital Ceremony. As you know, sound, wordplay and etymology are part of my spiritual and poetic practice, so watching both, certain words and phrases stood out to me, flowed and mixed together, and turned into this poem. By the way, thank you to Healthy Healers‘ Orlanda Jefferson for her protection + abundance wreath that also inspired the poem, too, because of the specific shell in it that is mentioned in the poem. Part I will be published in Issue 3 of Spoken Black Girl. Enjoy!
The Unknowable
Name
A sacred mark
The door entrance of a ship
The opening and closing
mouth sound welcoming
the flow of nourishment
Nommo
A devotion to the absolute Word
That made the Dark talk
That revealed the light in the Dark
The stemulus projecting from its mystery
I sea
YeMaya
Angaria Delphinus found me
The WRiding of a spiral shell
found its way to me
like a roaming Nomad
like mother’s fish soup in the amniotic fluid
Made the Dark Talk
on a tiding breath
Made the Dark Turquoise
like a flowing of gems
in the waters of Barbados
I stand at the margins
of my mother’s island
Island rippling
As a bird in liquid form
stirring in its shell
Made the Dark Turquoise
When it kraked the shell open
to leave for a new rooting
to discover its wild strength bubbling within
like a Guinea fowl named Numididae Meleagris
Island rippling from Mogadishu
A hallowed place dug out
and talking the truth springing from its mystery
like a lotus rising from the mud
A medicine from history’s poison
Mogadishu
weaves a wide wreath like a konch
weaves a web like a dream
Ring
around like the lotus
Olokun
Dark deep hooked us and rose us
A reunion of a flowing bearer and a flowering truth
All voices singing keys to unlock its own riddle
We all bonded together and washed over
by the Word reborn in an Image/Nation
KW — (the coordinates of Languitude & Atlantitude)
Sherese Francis: Futuristically Ancient 