Between the sea and the aging birds.
Between a people who exist in the space between
confinement and devotion, and what awaits us at
the shores—the invasion on board. Everything is
coming alive—the vines in the graveyards, the roots
on the mountains. There’s a stack of salt twirling out
of mangroves. Snarls of mockery, surges of tendrils
emerging from the ground, wrapping my body, binding
me into vegetation. These spirals—it began when the
fishes lost their scales to the oils. When the rubber
patches on the boats met softness at the kiss of water
and there were not many hands to bail the leak back into
the rivers. It began when we waited at the riverbank for
return and from afar we saw the paths covered with
overgrown trees weeping into the creeks, hyacinths
stumbling in the way of home. It mattered not to the heavens,
when the sadness in our eyes layered over the sizzling sunset.
Or when the ports fractured into the coastlines and our legs,
in constraint, folded into the bowels of ships.
The lands have borrowed our becoming; and we have latched
onto their essence, leeching their sap and evoking droughts,
wildfire, altering their waves when the winds wheel into them.
We have nothing left to offer the sea, and we have been humming
our prayers into a land that reverences sacrifice. The earth is
a mangrove of solitude, and we are nothing but buzzes enacting
into the core of what needs abundance to unstrap the ruins we created.
