I. Cork County, Ireland

I’m guessing that you are what lives
in the back of my throat, my fake swagger,
my unlearned fist: but I really don’t know
if it’s you. I chose you as my best guess because of the bloodshed
cutting grooves into your green shoulder, Rebel County;
because of the song that hums just a few inches below your green that
sounds faintly like fiddle, dulcimer, and banjo. The red neck
hides underneath brown skin; every now and again it erupts,
rebel and cheeky face upturned to an August sun. I hear twang in its
whisper. I wish I could still hear the brogue
below the red, below the fist; wrap my tongue around
Corcaigh instead of Cork in a green, pint-riddled and
iron breath.

II.Tirupati, Andra Pradesh, India

I don’t know you, but I want to. I have been
pulling your threads by the raw, wrapped ends that stick up like sentinels
out of my skin since I was twenty-three. It started
with creative anachronisms and trips to the only
store in Columbus, Ohio where I could buy saris. But then
your food got a hold of my tongue.

I am looking for my spent ashes in every
river that coils through every stomach and spleen, shoulder
and god-breath in the body that holds you: between
each gleam of sun jewel that rides the river, I hope to see
my own dirty rafts of charred dust. I ride those rivers until
your sister’s waterfalls skim my shoulder, my neck, pool down dreams
behind my eyes – I half suspect that she stole them from Atlantis. And you built
a row of temples towards the back of my skull when I wasn’t looking. You
sneak. I did not come from your belly but now,
I want to be your daughter.

III. Goslar, Germany

Not Neuschwanstein Castle: it’s too damn
young, a woman of fake grandeur and costume jewels. She looks
too much like Paris Hilton with Marie Antoinette styling, and I want
the real breath of ghosts blowing through my bones. Maybe Kaiserpfalz Goslar
might do the trick? They rebuilt her new skin, but
I might still hear her skull chattering its teeth while I skim
her stones with my footsteps.

This has to be where
the shadows that live where my vertebrae and skull meet
came from. I knew that the black had to have arisen from somewhere,
because despite my old hopes, I am not a child of blood and fangs.When we
go there, I’ll strain my ears for words whispering inside the sunset,
hush the windfall of my own chest to hear prayers still living inside
the lean of St. Ulrich’s Chapel: I hear that they
climb up the stones at sunrise to greet the morning.

IV. Unknown African Port City

This is where I began, and this is
where I will end: where water meets dust, where
black meets blue. I don’t know whether to laud Alex Haley or
curse him for the longing that sits heavy atop my solar plexus and has
ridden it like a stolen throne since I was fourteen. I don’t even know
whether I have the right city, if this is where my DNA first arose
from dirt cracked open by the hands of sunlight.

Is this Banjul? Dakar? Abidjan? Or
Douala, where so many of us passed through the membrane of this land
like cheap cargo – hands and feet built black and marked
robotic for export to pull another man’s weeds, grow another man’s
food, feed another man’s mouth? How did the little seed that sprung me
survive without sunlight, cast over by Middle Passage darkness, but yet
lose her name, her color, her tongue? If I could
unwind my skin, pull apart the double-helixes and make them speak, I
would. Maybe there’s a map inside the
joints where these ladders can break apart – if only I could divine it
out of every A,G,T, and C that clings together.

I will stand where sun meets coast and
coast meets water. But how do I call myself Igbo, or Yoruba, or
Wolof? How do I know what to call these veins? I want to know where
the rumblings of my lopsided drum and my computer mind
come from. Maybe what birthed me was a
cage-headed wise man, barely verbal and full of rainbow puzzle pieces,
dancing his prayers while the traders snuck up behind him
to take him away. And if that is so, then he is somewhere
in this dirt: I just need to find him. Each rise of the sun
is another chance to dig him – and me – out of
the earth.

Written 1/31/11
© 2011 Nicole Nicholson. All Rights Reserved.

——————————————————
I just couldn’t stop: I wrote another poem for We Write Poem’s Prompt #39: The Bucket List. This time, I focused on four places I want to visit before I die — I have ancestry in three of them. I hope you enjoyed the poem.

-Nicole
——————————————————

Stumble It!