Poems for the One True Lover

Autumn was bewildering in its beauty, yet so brief. Its changes filled the forest with voices from every direction, all at once, speaking of a new way to proceed. Rain – leaves – frost – gunshots – geese – roadkill deer – prickly cornfields – snow – silence.

East became a quieter vestige of sunlight. West shifted the gaze with the birthing of wintertide winds. Red-winged blackbirds and geese took their campaigns south. And True North? He peered down through the night sky, confident in his belt of stars. He drew back his bow and hunted everything he would need to survive the winter. He constructed the heavens for our shelter and he was done, he composed a poem for his One True Lover.

In Kenya I remember hosting a pot-latch meal of many cultures instead of celebrating Thanksgiving. Baba Tony brought maize and Mama Joanne made sikuma wiki. There was a goat from up the street and a turkey ordered from South Africa. We shared ancestral traditions and bursts of warbling laughter. We communed in the work, next to the fire. For the life of me, I cannot understand why that is not the way we break and bake bread every day.

It's Thanksgiving time again in another colonized tillage. We bring abundance and harvest to the table, yet we are descendants of the Puer Aeternus – living the provisional life, never really digging into the accountability of the land and people we abuse.

Black ice everywhere. As the snow falls and falls, I eat a bowl of popcorn, snuggled into my bedroom nest. I am a colonizer too, eating food I didn't grow, in a bed I didn't trade for or build, in a clan who doesn't know from whom they stole the land.