this time

this time i smile down on you, grandma

daddy holds me in his arms

you sink up to your shoulders in this sea

that you call evidence that God’s just showing off

daddy holds me in his arms

and while you both look at my mother

beautiful unlikely gift from God

i look at you instead

and while you both look at my mother

across salt and distances of sand

i look at you instead

my father stands

across salt and distances of sand

photos and mornings of tears

my father stands

taken by oxygen and years

photos and mornings of tears

you sink to your shoulder in the sea

taken by oxygen and tears

so now it’s me

this time

i’m smiling down

on you

Sometimes it’s such a young voice that comes to bring the poems. My grandmother never underestimated me. She thought I was a worthy interlocutor for questions of life, death, afterlife and the unknown. She shared her wisdom and experience with me, but she was not afraid to show me that there was so much she did not know. So much that she wondered about. What she knew for sure? The energy that gave birth to this universe was feminine. What she wondered about? What happens after we die? And our relationship was a relationship of wonder. Wondering what would have her life been if she, the ever curious child, had been born in my circumstances. With a mother less afraid, with a father less constricted and constricting. In a word more receptive to the poems and questions of a Black girl. I came to her over and over with the question “what was it like?” I wanted to know what it was like during the Anguillian revolution. What was it like to participate in direct action civil disobedience in segregated spaces in New Jersey? What was it like to travel with women’s organizations to all the countries she sent back gifts from? What was it like to be a Black student at Pratt Institute in the 30s? But she wanted to know how it was for me. How did it look from my perspective? And how would it be? What could I see that she couldn’t fathom yet. From the age that she could walk, she says, she wanted to go beyond whatever she knew. So maybe our relationship is a study in perspective. It was my grandmother’s passing that made me an ancestral listener. All I knew was that the conversation had to continue.

This picture shows me the shift in our relationship that comes with the difference in my perspective after my father’s passing. The unspoken cliche that she is looking down on me from heaven, might be too directionally specific. She is everywhere. But in this picture and as the person looking down into the photo album I am looking down on her, I have height, because of my father’s act, even now, of elevation. Because of my mother’s embrace of this moment in particular. Because I hold the already disintegrating picture in my hands. What can I see from here, beyond what I let myself know? How completely I am loved. How humble my wise first teacher, be she grandmother or ocean, be she mother or lens of glass be he father or healing heartbreak. How great the height from all this lifting. How full and generous the wonder. How glad for what I still don’t know.

P.S. My every day writing practice shapes my days into vessels for generations of love. If you want support with your own daily creative practice, I’d love to be part of your journey. This is the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive.