The Poem of this Week is The Debt by Tim Seibles
I have the blood of the conquerors in my veins
and the blood of the enslaved and the slaughtered,
so where shall I rest with this
mixed river of blood painting my heart—what city
wants me, which woman will touch my neck?
Nigeria is sleeping in the angles of my skull
and maybe two small French towns—
one in each leg—are also sleeping, and of course,
the first people in this land, with their long
black, black hair, seven of them
are napping along my ribs
And with all these people
adrift my body, I am asleep as well—
dreaming their good wishes, their strained whispers,
sleepwalking all over America.
But it’s alright, in my country,
everyone is asleep: at the wheel, on the job, even
with their fingers on the trigger, asleep
with their distant continents, the glittering
silence of their shattered histories
and the long pull of a thousand
thousand moons inside them.
They don’t remember
how once we swam inside our mothers, that
once our mothers floated inside their mothers,
just as their mothers once waited inside those
before them and before that it was the same—
all the way back to the first mother
in Africa,
that slim, short, quick-tempered woman
whose children crawled all over the planet,
then got big and started
hurting each other—with the conquerors
in their bright armor, trying to finish everything.
I know where the blame falls. I know
I could twist my brown skin, my mixed nations,
my kinky hair into a fist. I know. I know.
But I hear a stranger music in my bones—
the windy shimmer of long fields, a quiet of birds
stunned by dusk, the singular tree of all blood
rising, the future awake singing from these wounds
and what is the lesson of history, if not
that we owe each other more bread, more
friendship, fewer lies,
less cruelty.