We are each other’s, Sarah,
singing our own holy, holy, holy, and your five boys
aren’t fibroids growing in my womb here.
My thinking body walks away from my body. I inhale presences,
recollections wading through echoes of mamas.
Mamas filled with fragments of golden broom fields,
abandoned and surrounded by rivers.
And, oh lord, would your ears be filled with our music,
heartbeat at back of throat, a pleading for children,
children I would not bear and will not enter here.
What will become of children I’ve forgotten
and, oh lord, do they weep?
My fears become overheard,
black and red turkey vultures hissing overhead,
this time I listen to my own pitted heart,
release who I had to be,
who I’ve left behind.
I have so much time to learn my own song.
I ask myself, “Lou, what will we sing?”
My ma learned how to suffer for a house.
A family heard her desires in a 23rd cycle,
cycle of I shall not want. When I was two,
I’d cry until I choked.
I ain’t a woman,
but women don’t mind me being.
I ain’t a man, either.
My body is a hydrangea bush.
If somebody asks if dying is worse, I’m here.
“I’m here.” Blue jays whisper.
My blood knows why before I do.
Click here to read Marlanda Dekine on the origin of the poem.
Image: photo by rivage on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
Marlanda Dekine:
I like to write automatically by placing my pencil on the paper and writing while trying not to edit myself. I do this with a set timer. When the timer rings, I stop. Then, I return to what was written to revise an image, or idea, or to pull out a line or phrase that resonates with me. This poem was written that way. It is part of a set that explores a same-gender loving relationship between a Gullah-Geechee descendant’s great-great-great grandmothers: Lou and Sarah. I am trying to write without them in mind, but they keep arising in the writings. The idea to write automatically came to me from The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I read it about 10 years ago. Since then I’ve read about Lucille Clifton and W.B. Yeats and their experiences with automatic writing. I find the practice fascinating, so I continue to work with it as one of my writing practices.
Marlanda Dekine is the author of Thresh & Hold (Hub City Press, 2022) and i am from a punch & a kiss (unnamed LLC, 2017). Her work has been anthologized in This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets, What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People, and Ecological Solidarities: Mobilizing Faith and Justice in an Entangled World. She has received awards and fellowships from the South Carolina Arts Commission, South Carolina Humanities, Castle of our Skins, Tin House, Hub City Press, and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems have been set to music by composers, Omar Najmi and Douglas Boyce, sung by Kelley Hollis, performed by counter)induction, and published by Orion Magazine, Oxford American, Southern Cultures, and elsewhere. She is the founder of Speaking Down Barriers. Dekine holds a BA in Psychology from Furman University (2008), an MSW in Social Work from the University of South Carolina (2011), and an MFA in Poetry from Converse University (2024).
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