Nothing Begets Nothing
what is the heart of nothing but gesture?
we collapse meaning when we say sameness
everyone knows time is a hummingbird
scrumping seconds to hover over hunger
and who’s to say what’s worth keeping
except keeping itself
I mean that it is having that becomes king –
old sickness so slow it’s molasses in the blood
time moves differently for the oppressed
and the oppressor
scuttles and flurries
sits and shifts
and what fury it takes to keep things
is matched only by an equal fist
not violence or prayer
more a toppling
the midwife who asks the mother still bleeding –
small mouth stuck suckling firmly at her breast
her son alive but black –
what epitaph she has chosen to call him by
makes a warm leaving of this boy’s coming
she is echoing an old question
though she says she does not know it
the new mother searches for new language
the colony was there – fecund land
is now here – black body
she wants to say Methuselah but the midwife writes
Abiku
muscular time changing nothing
again
and
again
the midwife is with not alone in her question
she conflates time
like a hangman’s riddle asks
who is both born alive
and is already dead?
it is nothing to say the dead cannot resist
cannot undo
that they revolt but cannot do –
what these living do –
weighed down and fixed as they are
by stone and sand
whatever else is consequence
snake that it is
time eats at itself
its petty petty pace
nothing
changing
nothing
while the colony shifts shape
no lilt here
something hisses and hums
not even nothing begets nothing.