My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 135

134

By
CYNTHIA
DEWI OKA

Promised Land: Sonnets for My Mother
I.
Wake to the violin of leaves. Before light’s vein
ruptures night’s harem of sirens and red-eye crows,
pull dark deep in your lungs, wash your face in shadows.
A thick cloth between you and the wolves in your brain
rends inch by whitening inch. Breath’s hunger for rain
nooses the sallow air, seams the hush of pillows
made silken by sweat, your body’s heat the bruised rose
giving up its fleshy please to a prayer’s cane.
In real time, the strings you hear are water,
your mother’s hand the bow gliding it to crescendo.
Arched over steel she scours what cannot be sung back
to their unscarred state: plates, bowls, the chipped decanter
your father bought at a garage sale years ago
when his calling was certain as ink’s garb of black.

III.
Like milk and honey, fear clotted the moon’s rays
when credit ran lean as canned soup, staying warm meant
sitting in church four nights a week and paying rent
shackled her to a decade of twelve-hour days,
six-day weeks at the sweatshop two hours away.
Winter, stuttered benediction of knuckles, lent
snow’s chaos of pronouns to her already bent
tongue, loaves of discount bread frozen for months and gray
she swallowed without chewing. Faith, raised to duty,
is made for such times as these when you must grope blind
for shoes in the cement of night, trick aching bones
to lurch with the bus, listen to your mouth empty
of meaning every time you try to cross the line
between you and daughters goldening into stones.

II.
How to hear God’s call among the black thousand
hungers that needle flesh into a single cry,
sleet of bodiless wings, a riven tongue of sky?
Flight is the armored wind prowling his shadow, sand
spilling out of its eye sockets. He feels its hand
in the wrench of dung-crust ed dokar wheels, the sigh
of kites ruffling crowns of coconut trees, the lie
of a homeland as the heart’s rest. How do they stand
up, twenty pews away from each other without
ever trading a single glance, when a man they
have never seen before asks, who believes here
with all of the words they have never braved aloud,
all the names and lengths of skin they have gnawed away,
in land where milk and honey can sweeten fear?

IV.
Between gold and the stone’s grammar: hand and table,
roof and mirror, shoe rack, staples and tins of Spam,
signatures, carpet, margarine and bitter jam,
fumes and frayed gloves, how fog rinses pine and cable,
the cardboard, scissors, leather a man is able
to incarnate at will by nuance of a door slam,
and girls like dandelions who bleed and bedlam
the light-polluted skies with the speed of Babel.
Between slat and rain, between tongues, we designed,
my sister and I, brick of cloth, voice of fur,
our own pop culture of microwaveable silt
and decapitated Barbies. We swam and mined
drawls for our midnight radio, cranked it to blur
their marathons of blame: our near plastic guilt.