blooms, blessings, sustenance itself: nearly everything fruitful comes from the earth

2019
Miré Regulus

i. blooms
 
How do we land where we land? Arrive
survive and grow
I should know this, I am grown after all
 
Each one of us an improbability
an extraordinary blossoming
all the names and unnamed of all the bodies
Each one of us a fiercely dreamed of flowering
a prayed for season
 
And I should know who flourished before me
Understand what roots my beliefs, my hopes
After all I am grown
My blooming now is because of then
 
When I look back
the men don’t hesitate
they speak up
they visit with demands
we are they insist
say where they walked where they sat where they mattered
 
The women, they trust I know they’re there
after all my flower unfurling comes from their seed
they are the soil of my survival
when I ask them a question direct, my grandmothers don’t answer
they work, stare and move hands
when I ask where they belong where they were the starshine, comforted and loved
they move in memory, but no more
 
So I dig, reversing the harvest
Working back in search of essence, kernel, germ
To seed the line back
I have to dig/ask
Unearth/listen and repeat
 
 
 
ii. blessings
 
here is what I know:
Roxie was not a tall girl
But she loved basketball
Reaching up, shooting through the rim
Scoring points, counting something
 
She didn’t stay with her
sisters and brothers
On the farm, stayed in town
 
Never made her beau
a cake or scrambled egg
Even after wed, she would be ill at the sight
Transformable, a glistening beginning of alive
 
Lucille, shorter still
made her way through
Half-sister to her cousins
Called Shorty out of simplicity, or maybe love
 
Being that man’s child
Told not to speak of it
and then love and the body, making more
Children with someone else’s husband
 
Stayed still, stayed patient
In the Miami heat, worked hard
She’d be damned if she couldn’t fix this
 
 
what else I know:
         I am a wealth of knowledge, a human resource bank
         These women were sharp, capable
         And in this moment, I am their pinprick
         Of advancement, their knife edge
         Fierce flourishing of their hearts’ blossoming
         Seeding this patch of ground
 
 
 
iii. sustenance itself
 
I am troubled,
I am sorrowed
That so much feels lost, is lost
There is so much I do not know
Of the women who tended the soil for the idea of me
sowed the earth and then fell where I bloom
Because of work and time and lives of daily cultivation
So much feels lost, is lost
 
My light, my luck, my shine is because of them
because of fierce and driven survival
Because of fierce and driven survival
and the spiral from which we unfurl is an act of the universe loving itself