~
She is not our shrine,
she prays differently
with eyes wide open,
fingers on votive offerings,
preferring her solitude
in the Tea Garden, drinking light

Tomorrow on the tarmac
one flowered suitcase,
stamped for the city of neon people,
will travel to her song,
the pilgrimage of anemic lovers

Her hoisting from water,
(ampullae in hand),
and the unique boutique
growing out of
an alabaster chamber
bring monks out of hiding

The center line of her,
where the flower blooms forth
and learns by observation,
is still an unvisited temple

Until in season of calligraphy,
when she releases the Kogai
from her hair and sits with friendly toes
outstretched in the warm intimacy of
shared water
~

Notre-Dame, she is quite old: although she may
bury Paris, which has witnessed her birth, one day
But in thousand years or more, Time will make recoil
her heavy body, like a wolf does with a bull
and twist each iron axon, each of her neurones
to gnaw alas, with its blunt tooth, her bones of stones!

Many men will overflow the island in the Seine
to contemplate the barren ruin, the last remains
dreamers, re-reading what Victor Hugo has seen ahead:
- Then they'll think they see the old basilica
as it was, mighty and magnificent, a Gloria
rising up before them like the shadow of a dead!

every time
i speak my own
name i taste
the blood of
my mother's bit
lip (&) held tongue-- a self shed
to take rein

o' my father's flatiron
sur/name:
the blood, reigned (&)
i remain—
sanguine & ruddy
after all
(these broods).

In another life, my father
must have been a blacksmith.
Essential in his village
Essential to be needed
(otherwise what’s the point?)

Swinging his hammer in heat, in smoke,
content within his St Bruno haze, suspicious
of anything lighter than black leather
anything lighter than brass fittings

- comfortable with sweat stains and scattered ash,
scars and deep bruises marking him
a man’s man and breadwinner,

- relaxed with the air blue, the tribe white
and his iron laughter echoing with every strike,

every blow shaping his son
into his family’s likeness.

~
Hark!
He knocks.
Time, it's time,
the Kuroi Jukai within me.

Finding an unordinary
drifting off to sleep point,
a hollowed-out spot,
where I can let
God dream for me.

Whistles in the wind,
in lullaby the sky and sea
seem to trade places,
bending around me
as vertical blanketed surges.

My carcass is a colonization (of bones)
for my dearly departed ones,
forbearers of migration,
seeking endless sea,
until like them,
I settle upon
their ancestral shore.
~

One day you left your home
Among with all you hated most;
You left old lullabies unsung
And swore you'd lose your mother tongue
As shivering, small hands still clung
To one life free of ghosts.

After your ghosts had been released
You filled up all the holes.
You lived a life of mostly ease
And never knew you paid your fees
For ghosts are mostly memories
And languages are souls.

Sometimes I stick out from my friends a bit - I think. It’s the French in me. Americans have this excité-ment about things - that’s, well, exhausting.

Sometimes, when friends are jumping about, they practically plead for my engagement. I think I have a genetic, French reticence, an observer gene.

True, I have my moments of bitter COVID lock-down angst but I'm doing better than some friends. Maybe because the French live slowly - life is just moments - once a moment has passed, it’s gone.

I wait, in my secret gardens, like a cat on a settee, sipping small pleasures. The poet in me refuses to zone out - there are poems in the stillness.

A borrowed history
A second-hand life
A true heritage denied.

This stranger sapling grafted to your family tree.
And the story told, to them and me;
" You were chosen, you are special, we were lucky..."

So you won.
Here's your prize;
A commodity baby, a charity child
Love conditionality and gratitude implied.
Woken from connection and amniotic peace
To a secret story of threefold grief.

They think that cos they wearing badges that
its power, feeling it be like they wild west.
          thinking they catching outlaws.

When they the ones letting the shots hit unarmed
                                           hands on his head.
but they not moving as he shouted gun.

It wasn't even a mobile, they just trigger happy
                       in blue as the family was in black.

Tears aren't bringing his last word back,
                       Mum, Daddy,
last cherished thought his baby girl.
Tears fell silent as they had knees on his neck,
                         what the **** he dead
yet you thinking he needs cuffs,
                                   morality took a side step.

No one is on their knee no more,
         hands held at height trying
to reach the fallen to show that they
still being reached for.

I promise we ain't forgetting any fallen,
       we'll reach high walking the streets.
   They ain't holding pistols to this many.

Hands-on heads showing peaceful metaphors,
          we shouldn't have to be scared
of a badge that's meant to protect
                               not a knee on a neck.


Or a gunshot on an unarmed person,
                   due to his demographical heritage.
                     another fell like a tree in a forest.

But every flower has a camera and nothing
falls silently anymore.