Tag Archives: memory

Soul Pool

Soul Pool

I have existed for eons before I was born

As a descendant of my womenfolk

Who have cradled me within their wombs

Nurturing my spirit they have always known

Just as I know them in my aging, dusty carcass

Animated by their tribal songs that lent me their breath

Extending their pneuma into my mortality

Anointing me with collective wisdom as my inheritance

Courage emblazoned like a scarlet letter;

ushered in with fiercest loyalty

Resilience bestowed as an endowment of hope

Strength of a champion intrinsically passed down

I am born again and again, basking in the immortality

Reveling in the joyful victories of lives well lived

Lamenting the horrors and pains that are birthed;

And rebirthed, and again

I am my mother’s eyes, my grandmother’s faith,

My great-grandmother’s charm,

my great-great-grandmother’s muscle memory

I am because of their willingness to grant me

This Soul Pool in which I float and swim

Ms. Marble

Marbles

Marbles

If I could be a marble in a bag around a child’s waist

propounding challenge to my peers like an alchemist

whose recipe for destruction lay in my bulging satchel

filled with conquests found in the sandpit battlefield

of my childhood playground, dominated by concentrated

versions of precisely aimed shots using one inch of glass

and stick drawn circles of boundaries no other should cross.

If I were a marble in a sack around my childhood waist

I would be a peerie of blue green that made them lose

as they wondered at my ocean colors splashing their spirits free

through the distractions of the wildly colored cat’s eyes

that stared back at them with deadened stares emptied

of life, unlike me, who shined and waved like the open sea

And they would avoid hitting me with their knocker’s sin

because who doesn’t want Mother Ocean to win?