FLYING
We arrived in the windy city thirty minutes ago,
two hours delayed.
No apologies.
Many passengers are missing their connections,
but I opted in for a sevem-hour layover
to enjoy the midwestern feel, after all.
Never seen a substitute plane in the US
until today, a generic plane,
with no United Airlines on it.
I tell you, flying in and out of Central PA
has its upside.
There’s always material for poetry.
Have you ever heard an airline attendant say,
“We will be delayed
because the plane’s computer is telling
us that one of its engines
is very low on oil?” Yes, low on oil,
like a car, like something
that needs ground to ground it,
like a motorcycle. And then a technician
comes on board, screws things in,
while he’s on the phone.
Thirty minutes, he’s still screwing
the plane together. By then, I’m saying
the Lord’s prayer, the 23rd Psalm,
the 125th Psalm, the Bible. I’m calling on Moses
to part the Red Sea for me.
I want to grab my husband,
and run, but good old, trusting husband
and comfortable Americans are sitting
there, waiting for a screwed-up plane
the way Americans wait. Silent, staring,
comfortably eating a donut,
sipping a drink, unlike me, this Grebo
woman who has seen death over and over.
Finally, the teenage-looking pilot
needs a bathroom break, and he runs
to the restroom. And another 15 minutes,
the tech person leaves. We take off,
bumpy, a Canadian plane,
I realize, and now I’m thinking of a lake,
where we can land, but the landing,
bumpy, clouds, Lake Michigan, inviting,
but thank goodness, the young pilots forgot
to dump us in its blue foams, Lake Michigan,
blue, beautiful, and polluted,
but it’s still Lake Michigan.
When I grow up, I want to be a fish,
a big blue fish, if I ever grow up.
I COME FROM A COUNTRY WHERE BLACK
PEOPLE STILL CALL THEMSELVES SLAVES
I Come from a Country where black people
still call themselves Americo-Liberians,
still cling to cotton plantations.
Their heritage, they say,
clinging to a history of how they
came from America to save
the heathens of these African shores,
to save the “primitive” Africans
who needed Jesus so bad, white
slave masters sent
their sons by the enslaved women
to save Africa from sin.
After more than a century, my people
still trace their roots to the Mayflower
that brought them back to what
is now called Liberia, land of liberty,
this alien land, called Africa,
as if this ‘alien land’
was not the home of their ancestors,
the movement of black people,
our people, dragged across
the continent in chains, leg to leg,
arm to arm, neck, locked onto
hundreds of other necks.
I come from the land where millions
of our people were snatched
from their kingdoms, from kinships
and home and tradition and life.
Black people, hauled onto ships,
and when they fell ill, were dumped
into the Atlantic, black
with my people’s blood,
and for hundreds of years, the Atlantic’s
surging and rolling in anger,
as our people were dragged
to cotton Plantations,
where the soil is still red and hot like the soil
at home in our one country,
the irony of history when it is untold.
I come from a country of brokenness,
of silent histories, the secrecy of slavery,
a fear that holds the captive, captive
forever, because slavery only begets slavery
and hate begets hate.
I come from a country where my people
that I love still call themselves
Americo-Liberians, as if the children
of Israel would dare
call themselves Egyptian Israelites.
NOVEMBER
This is what November looks like,
dark, cold, unforgiving,
and as pure as a dead body,
finally purified of earthly possessions.
Sins.
Earthly burdens,
the need to rise and work the fields,
the tilling and gathering
the living do.
November of yellowing, red
leaves, giving up so the snow can come,
birds, packing up their wares
for warmer places,
and my neighbor’s leaves, coming
home to roost
on my lawn.
Even the hills around me, the Alleghenies
giviving up their beauty
the way a woman gives up
her waistline, her deep smile,
her loveliness of body
and walk
to bring new life into the world
in birthing chambers,
the way daylight gives up its ghost
to the night.
November is coming upon us
like our dead past,
and over the hills, darkness
at 9 in the morning.
Night does not need to work hard,
since morning has become the night.
Our world, closing in upon us, like
folding palms, like
the dying of the already dead.
BEFORE THAT FIRST SHOT IS FIRED
Before that first shot is fired,
before that first bloody rocket
falls
on our home
before the first house explodes,
there is peace, calm, the quiet morning
mist settling over the hills,
the outskirts
of the city,
filled with people, laughing, living,
colorful flowers, daffodils, roses
flaunting their fragrance and their
thorny beauty.
Before some tyrant somewhere
breathes his first fiery words
and before
he wields his sword
at the innocent, who were about
their business, school children
in the schoolyard were running
around, chasing a ball,
mothers, standing
somewhere in a nearby park,
watching their toddlers at play.
The world was at work setting
the world right.
And then, that tyrant
war-maker, that bloodthirsty giant
of evil things, that maker of refugees
and creator of poor emaciated bodies,
maker of dead
bones, that power-greedy
monster decided to manufacture
war, to send his rockets to schoolyards,
to rip up people and buildings
and streets
and towns and life,
houses exploding, and suddenly,
the school yard is bereft. Supermarkets
in the city and the village roads
and the birds
and trees and life
and explosion, explosion, and war,
war, war, war. And then, long lines
of desperate people carrying small
bundles, hungry children,
the blessings of war,
so immense, and then finally, all of life
dies, just so war can live.
PATRIOTIC SONG FOR MY COUNTRY
Oh, Liberia, sometimes,
I just want to lay down the Grebo Mat,
and wail from dawn
to sunset, yes, to weep for the country
where the old women dug a deep hole,
in Dolokeh, and buried my umbilical cord
so, I would not stray from home,
so, I would not lose my way,
so, I would come back home
again, and again.
So I would carry this country
in all of its dirt and flaws, its soil, its waters
and all of its swamps, all the bloodiness
of our wars, the roaring of an ocean,
so angry, the ghosts of our wars,
lingering at sandy shores of the Atlantic
at night. So, I would carry this place
in all of its sorrows, its inability to rise
out of the scars of the war that sapped away
the fresh palm wines
of our youth, driven us from home, eaten up
our years and our children who were birthed
at the roadsides during the war.
All the losses left with us by warriors who
didn’t even know why they fought.
Thirty-three years since the war began,
and I’m still learning the language of ghosts,
the banging of aging pipes, the rattling
of paper walls, aging glass, and the windows
of my home in this alien land.
I’m still learning to live among the living,
but all the ghosts
from my homeland are still searching
for a home to rest their weary souls.
At night, they gather along the blue
Atlantic, oh Liberia, land that has forgotten
the hundreds of thousands you sent
to early graves, those you massacred,
oh, now, how so quickly you have
forgotten to remember.