1960

The night the flag of the British empire came down
in my country, the cry of a mottled wolf was heard in the wild.
In a monastery near the delta, a woman
saw stone doves flapping their cherubic wings
in the dark and panicked, but it was the white cenotaphs of Christian
missionaries.
In a coastal town that abuts the lagoon and the
“Point of No Return” a priest, a returned slave,
prayed in groans and translated scriptures.
In a long house with a warren of rooms, a sculptor tore a page
from a book of maps in her dream and made a paper ship
she named Amistad, a gift, she whispered to her daughter
in that dream, a gift from the ghosts, for they too are citizens.
That night, street sweepers, some of whom
were shepherd poets, leaned their mouths close to the shrubs
and star apple trees of their villages, and chanted as they swept, believing
that the earth had ears and could be made tender
by miracle speech. That night, a young playwright dreamt
and saw the swaying dance of tall trees in a dark forest.
In a tower with a colonial balustrade, young
soldiers slept and rehearsed in their dreams
the future deaths they would bring. Among them future dictators.
They believed cruelty was their destiny.
All the families had sons they would give
to the war, so they prayed for daughters.
A country made for ruins. There was no country.
In a groove of spruce, a widow, before her child
was lowered into the grave in the dark, closed
his eyelids in the coffin, said, “Hurry on now.
Go meet the King.” It was a dream.
In a deeper dream, in a rotunda of plums,
voices were heard among Tupelos, the laughter of spirit children.
A Garment maker, my grandfather, muttered
in his sleep, “Oh God, what a century,
what a century.”
A black hawk lifted above a white cliff
and disappeared into the blue wine-jar of heaven.
It was a dream. There was no heaven.
This is the history of the night my mother was born