She, The Creator
After Vermeer’s pendants, The Astronomer & The Geographer
Come! Now! To the window of the world and see
the things I have under my hands. Careful! For I hold
continents in my palms and stir whirlpools with my thumbs.
Can you see it? The leviathan arching across my heartline,
the straits of my past lives crafting a waterway from where
I have come to where I am still to venture. Watch as I spin
this world from the silver in my hair, as I create mountains in the sky
with the crescent of my nails. I wear that blue gown like a crown
for the whole of my body. Watch! When I step into the light,
see how the Heavens dance for the movement of my hips. Listen!
How the soil hums beneath my planted feet. How the stars sing
for the glory of my skin, ornamented by the rings and moons of every
Cosmic body.
a Black woman at a concert wears a Led Zeppelin shirt
if the King Himself were to shuffle the earth’s
magnetic field like dominos on a table like St. Louis
blues in the jowls of a white man to ride the dip
of your waist so that this sweat-flavored
room and the world outside it all revolved
along the reeling rocking axis of your hips
there would still be a man eyeing your shirt
asking you between sets to name five songs by Led Zeppelin
but not Good Times Bad Times or
Achilles Last Stand and definitely not
Stairway to Heaven…
and if the Godmother of Rock n Roll Herself were to lift
your head and kiss the underside of your chin
with a single finger her touch divine like sin and
like God in The Creation of Man the imprint
of your history might be read from your skin and then
the rest could know we’ve been here since the beginning
plaiting these licks these into our hair like okra seeds
licks that taste of Delta mud and bite like Chicago blues
keep following
and those licks’ll take you back to a place
remembered by foot stomps illegal drumbeats hollers and echoes
I swear
if the Grandfather Himself squeezed the cosmos into His mighty hand
like a fat April-ripe lemon into a glass of front porch ice water the juice
that flows would be the same electrifying damp that curls
your roots and speckles your forehead as this man asks
so then, you’ve heard of John Bonham?
he can’t hear it but you do
that Howlin Wolf
calling out to ancient rivers
calling back to bloody fields
a transmission across time
to you
sister
here in this sweat-flavored
room through a cover of
a cover of a cover
I swear sister
we’ve been here
since the beginning