My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Página 31

By
ALLISON
HEDGE
COKE

First Morning
for Nancy

Barrio Tricentenario, Plaza de Banderas

DC STR #1 Adams House Suite

Wading footsteps of murdered
in the barrio Juan calls home
we sing our songs, tell stories,
cry a bit when conquistador
re-enactors dance in color.

In a room facing chimneys
over the place Nancy Morejón rests
between sleeps lining free lines
she whispers to hearing DC:
Obsidiana, Vilma en Junio,
Un Gato Pequeño A Mi Puerta.
Morning is birdsong
in an old Spanish town.
Though the chief
in his acquired misery
echoes Kenya until he breathes
life into malady, or at least compels
us so to believe, she sleeps with
Africa, Canton, and other points slavery
turn Cuban in her bone breath
bringing love, embrace, freedom from
whatever holds the rest of us in weight.
The lifting is simple, yet
without it how sad we all be.
Embargo=fear
Yet here she is!

30

Sugaring our boughs before we break.

Botero, blasted away, refilled
with forty sculpted doves,
in the city where from here
I love you deeply and from
there it was a night.
Butterflies fill streets
verse winging ways fluttered
by faces middling dark hours
leveling light.
Here you held
my hand, urged I follow, let
Bogota beckon while we
played our voices for victims
recalled by lovers, grandmas,
niños still swimming Escobar wakes.