On My Way Out I Passed Over You and the Verrazano Bridge

Leaving leaving 
the bridged water 
beneath
the red sands of South Beach
silhouette houses sliding off the horizon 
oh love,   if I become anger
feel me
holding you in my heart circling 
the concrete particular
arcs of this journey
landscape of trials
not to be lost in choice nor decision
in the nape of the bay
our house slips under these wings 
shuttle between nightmare and the possible.

The broad water drew us, and the space
growing enough green to feed ourselves over two seasons 
now sulfur fuels burn in New Jersey
and when I wash my hands at the garden hose
the earth runs off bright yellow
the bridge disappears
only a lowering sky
in transit.

So do we blow the longest suspension bridge in the world 
up from the middle
or will it be bombs at the Hylan Toll Plaza 
mortars over Grymes Hill
flak shrieking through the streets of Rosebank 
the home of the Staten Island ku klux klan
while sky-roaches napalm the Park Hill Projects 
we live on the edge
of manufacturing
tomorrow or the unthinkable
made common as plantain-weed
by our act of not thinking 
of taking
only what is given.

Wintry Poland survives
the bastardized prose of the New York Times 
while Soweto is a quaint heat treatment 
in some exotic but safely capitalized city
where the Hero Children's bones moulder unmarked 
and the blood of my sister in exile Winnie Mandela 
slows and her steps slow
in a banned and waterless living
her youngest daughter is becoming a poet.

I am writing these words as a route map 
an artifact for survival
a chronicle of buried treasure
a mourning
for this place we are about to be leaving
a rudder for my children   your children
our lovers   our hopes   braided
from the dull wharves of Tompkinsville
to Zimbabwe   Chad   Azania
oh Willie sweet little brother with the snap in your eyes
what walls are you covering now
with your visions of revolution
the precise needs of our mother earth
the cost of false bread
and have you learned to nourish your sisters at last 
as well as to treasure them?

Past darkened windows of a Bay Street Women's Shelter 
like ghosts through the streets of Marazan
the northeastern altars of El Salvador
move the belly-wise blonded children of starvation 
the once-black now wasted old people
who built Pretoria
Philadelphia   Atlanta   San Francisco 
and even ancient London—yes, I tell you 
Italians owned Britain
and Hannibal blackened the earth from the Alps to the Adriatic 
Roman blood sickles like the blood of an African people 
so where is true history written
except in the poems?

I am inside the shadow dipped upon your horizon 
scanning a borrowed Newsweek where american soldiers 
train seven-year-old Chilean boys
to do their killing for them.

Picture small-boned dark women 
gun-belts taut over dyed cloth 
between the baby and a rifle 
how many of these women
activated plastique near the oil refineries 
outside Capetown
burned their houses behind them
left
the fine-painted ochre walls
the carved water gourds still drying
and the new yams not yet harvested
which one of these women
was driven out of Crossroads
perched on the corrugated walls of her uprooted life 
strapped to a lorry
the cooking pot banging her ankles
which one
saw her two-year-old daughter's face 
squashed like a melon
in the pre-dawn police raids upon Noxolo
which one   writes poems
lies with other women 
in the blood's affirmation?

History is not kind to us
we restitch it with living 
past memory   forward 
into desire
into the panic   articulation
of want   without having
or even the promise of getting.

And I dream of our coming together 
encircled   driven
not only by love
but by lust for a working tomorrow 
the flights of this journey 
mapless   uncertain
and necessary as water.