dappled

what’s the word

dappled

with light

touched by leaves

left by sun

to learn shadow

dappled with light

three generations

left by sons who learn what black means

and return

three generations

of faces dark and light

return

to the same brown the same land

the same face dark and light

refracted to

the same brown the same land

the same salt the same sand

refracted too

and touched by leaves

the same salt the same sand

and no words

One way to tell the story is that there was and will forever be so much unsaid between my father and his father. One way to tell the story is that there is no language for the matrix of expectation, identification, fear and admiration that flowed between them across lifetimes and oceans. One way to tell the story is immigrant striving, boarding school, debt, Caribbean masculinities all of which are other names for silence. Or maybe those are all ways to not tell the story.

There is another available story which is that my father became a poet to create the language he needed to be his father’s son. For my grandfather’s 80th birthday, my father who had never written a poem wrote a book length epic poem for his father. He wrote it because my grandfather loved poetry and memorized and recited his favorite poems at every opportunity. What happens in the book, “The Seven Seeds,”? A an unnamed adult “son” asks an unnamed “old man” a question he has never found a way to ask. The son admits that despite prestigious educations and career success he and his siblings “are not at peace.” He asks “Please Father, tell us of a better way to live.” The father does. But then he also can’t. After outlining the seeds of a meaningful life, faith, determination, work, sacrifice, service and courage, he admits that there is one seed, the most important seed that he is actually still struggling with: LOVE.

My father said the poem rushed out of him all at once in one day turned night turned early morning of writing. After that he never stopped writing poetry. What my father learned was that poems make the impossible possible. There was no way my father outside of the book would have admitted to his father that his own first -generation Black immigrant measures of success left him feeling empty, that he was not at peace. There was no way that my grandfather outside of the book would have admitted that he longed to learn to love and be loved unconditionally. But in the book, it all happened. My grandfather loved his birthday gift. What he said to my father was “So you really were listening all this time.” What he did was brag to everyone that his son had written a book about him. My father published it so my grandfather could give copies to everyone who passed his porch.

In the picture I am doing what I do or crave to do while I am writing: snack on salt. It is no surprise that I come to this daily writing looking for a miracle. A way to say to my father what I never got to say, to hear what he never got to say. “The Seven Seeds” didn’t vanquish the patterns of silence in our family which are still mediated by capitalism, oceans, fear, expectation, longing and loss. The pattern of the sun and leaves writes on our faces and in this photograph my mother works with light shadow and wind to make us visible to ourselves and as each other. I am everyone in the picture now. I am the one left alive to look. I am the one left alive to speak. I am the one left to write a poem with enough light and enough shadow to hold all that we didn’t learn to say.

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. Videos, poem prompts, meditations and more are here for you in the Stardust and Salt Daily Creative Practice Intensive. Click the link to learn more.