Carolyn Dunn's News and Views

I.

In the young daylight

dreams of a better life

seemed so possible, so eventful,

within reach.

We shed our skins,

the stories of a disposed

people,

remained motionless

under the dawning

forecast of the rest

of our lives.

In our distress,

we remembered

how the taste of joy

once interred in our hearts slowly faded

as the daylight

moved on.

II.

In my bones

I carry the story

of blessing,

of death,

of breasts cut from bodies

of the dispossessed limbs,

severed from the solid

trunk of speech, of

matter, of blood

and birth;

skin shorn in flakes

from the dispossessed.

It was the beginning

of the descent of stars

into my bones.

III.

Someone said once

in a famous movie,

it’s as if a thousand screaming

voices were suddenly silenced.

Silence resists

the exit of bones,

seeps through the flesh

until the sound of the lash

comes on a dappled gray ash,

settling within blood.

There is no resistance

in this ancestral form of grieving.

It takes on many forms,

many refugees in the silence

of harbored secrets,

held close to where

no one can see them.

Blood and bone

is no safe place

for the missing, the murdered,

recorded generation

upon generation

until the silence,

reed thin, emaciated,

takes on the sallow glow

of diseased and broken

flesh.

IV.

When even walking becomes

a danger, foot in front of foot,

thinking “I must walk upright,

upright…

Worn bits of carpet,

faded wood, and marks

upon the wall of a home

that never wanted us,

wanted us.

Words are our only weapons,

as grief grows,

swallowing the knot

of feathers, bones,

and the undigested bits,

turning our steps

into shards of glass.

Bone fragments.

And we are glass, ever

shattering,

at any moment.

V.

The young daylight

found me, blood drying

in the early morning as

I gazed out over the burning

taste of the last drop

of fire upon my tongue.

I carry the voices

upon my tongue,

a world in which

there can be no mercy, no joy,

no thought of ever catching

the last train home.

I can’t hold on,

I can’t let go,

I can’t put one foot in

front of another,

can’t find the space of reason

to put a sentence together.

What good am I,

flying blind in this world

where words are what matters,

when the connection

between bone, blood, brain

is severed by the very

rising

of the sun in a place

where I’m not even

supposed to be?

Shedding your skin,

I step out of your shadow,

one eye to the stars,

the other,

missing you.

Labels: diaspora, home, Indian singing