"Becoming Seventy" _more poems on Barbie
…Yes, there’s a cosmic consciousness. Jung named it but it was there
long before named by Vedic and Mvskoke scientists. And, there is
a cosmic hearteousness — for the heart is the higher mind and nothing can be
forgotten there, no ever or ever. How do I sing this so
I don’t forget? Ask
the poets. Each word is a box that can be opened or closed. Then a train of
words, phrases
garnered by music and the need for rhythm to organize chaos. Like right
here, now, in this poem is the transition phase. I remembered it while giving
birth, summer sun bearing down on the city melting asphalt but there we were,
my daughter
and I, at the door between worlds. I was happier than ever before to
welcome her, happiness was the path she chose to enter, and
I couldn’t push
yet, not yet, and then there appeared a pool of the
bluest water. We waited
there for a breath
to catch up, and then it did, and she took it that girl who was
beautiful beyond dolphin dreaming, and we made it, we did, to the other side of
suffering. This is the story our mothers tell but we couldn’t hear it in our
ears stuffed with Barbie advertising,
with our mothers’ own loathing set in place by patriarchal scripture,
the smothering rules to stop insurrection by domesticated slaves, or wives. It
hurt everybody. The fathers cannot know what they are feeling in such a
spiritual backwash. Worship
boxes set into place by the need for money and power will not beget
freedom. Only warships. For freedom, freedom, oh freedom sang the slaves, the
oar rhythm of the blues lifting up the spirits of peoples whose bodies were
worn out, or destroyed by a man’s slash,
hit of greed. This is our memory too, said America. Heredity is a field
of blood, celebration, and forgetfulness. Don’t take on more than you can
carry, said the eagle to his twin sons, fighting each other in the sky over a
fox, dangling between
them. It’s that time of the year, when we eat tamales and latkes. We
light candles, fires to make the way for a newborn child, for fresh
understanding.
Demons will try to make houses out of jealousy, anger,
pride, greed, or more
destructive material. They place them in a
part of the body that will hold them: liver, heart, knee, or brain. So,
my friend, let’s let that go, for joy, for chocolates made of ashes, mangos,
grapefruit, or chili from Oaxaca, for sparkling wine from Spain, for these
children who show up in our dreams and want to live at any cost because
we are here to feed them joy. Your soul is so finely woven the silkworms
went on strike, said the mulberry tree. We all have mulberry trees in the
memory yard. They hold the place for skinned knees earned by small braveries,
cousins you love who are gone, a father cutting a
watermelon in the summer on
the porch, and a mother so in love that her heart breaks — it will
never be the same, yet all memory bends to fit. The heart has uncountable
rooms. We turn to leave here, and so will the hedgehog who makes a home next to
that porch. We become birds, poems.
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