Poetry, uh, Sundays: Audre Lorde

Sisters in Arms

The edge of our bed was a wide grid

where your fifteen-year-old daughter was hanging

gut-sprung on police wheels

a cablegram nailed to the wood

next to a map of the Western Reserve

I could not return with you to bury the body

reconstruct your nightly cardboards

against the seeping Transvaal cold

I could not plant the other limpet mine

against a wall at the railroad station

nor carry either of your souls back from the river

in a calabash upon my head

so I bought you a ticket to Durban

on my American Express

and we lay together

in the first light of a new season.

Now clearing roughage from my autumn garden

cow sorrel    overgrown rocket gone to seed

I reach for the taste of today

the New York Times finally mentions your country

a half-page story

of the first white south african killed in the “unrest”

Not of Black children massacred at Sebokeng

six-year-olds imprisoned for threatening the state

not of Thabo Sibeko, first grader, in his own blood

on his grandmother’s parlor floor

Joyce, nine, trying to crawl to him

shitting through her navel

not of a three-week-old infant, nameless

lost under the burned beds of Tembisa

my hand comes down like a brown vise over the marigolds

reckless through despair

we were two Black women touching our flame

and we left our dead behind us

I hovered    you rose    the last ritual of healing

“It is spring,” you whispered

“I sold the ticket for guns and sulfa

I leave for home tomorrow”

and wherever I touch you

I lick cold from my fingers

taste rage

like salt from the lips of a woman

who has killed too often to forget

and carries each death in her eyes

your mouth a parting orchid

“Someday you will come to my country

and we will fight side by side?”

Keys jingle in the door ajar    threatening

whatever is coming belongs here

I reach for your sweetness

but silence explodes like a pregnant belly

into my face

a vomit of nevers.

Mmanthatisi turns away from the cloth

her daughters-in-law are dyeing

the baby drools milk from her breast

she hands him half-asleep to his sister

dresses again for war

knowing the men will follow.

In the intricate Maseru twilights

quick    sad    vital

she maps the next day’s battle

dreams of Durban    sometimes

visions the deep wry song of beach pebbles

running after the sea.