The workman told you to bury a curled dark lock
Of your dead baby’s hair in the earth,
A quiet offering to a quieter god
You spent several months weeping to the sky
Your small hands curled into your white frock
Work was left unattended in your colorful house
No food on the stove,
No boiling salt fish, or softened dumplings in murky white water
The pungent smell of cured fish filling the quieter home
The home, austere and shrinking into the long street
Your helper comes to do all this
Your children understand in their small ways
You covered the lock of dark hair with fresh dark soil
Palm fronds wave in the wind
Salty sea air kisses your wet skin
Tears make tracks on your cheeks like a map pointing to
Nothingness, like a page of a book with words of moroseness
Once you had my mother, birthed her into a world of noise
The sure and strong hands of the matriarchal mother,
Your mother, who’d delivered more babies than she’d had her numerous children
Then you cooked, you toiled, swept the veranda with your broom
Left the buried lock of hair in the locked cabinet of your mind
Now, when I make the saltfish, I do it with stilted preparation
My hands form lumpy misshapen cornmeal dumplings
I fry the little ***** of dough for too long, they come out dry
I pop one into my mouth and chew
There, the fragrant smell of your perfume,
Sweet lull of your voice, your birdlike hands.