In this Wound, We Gather

A swirl of the Swahili word for self-help, harambee,
ribonned with the where of here, Quebec, forms a harvest: Harambec.

Led to the garden, spacious in/for
Blackness, we gather like roots, tangled
in mourning, breath, writing, movement, a leap –—
tectonic plates of ancestral grief

shift, ever so slightly. The force of gathering
translates in open palms, strangers made
kin in a whim of sharing, caring made
tangible through presence, simple (ephemeral).

The key is multiplicity, selves rendered
plenty through proximity, abandon to intimacy.
A world textured like peach, tender and bruised,
The garden holds it all.

Our dreams are wet with worlds
yet to be born           soil deep, I
feel tomorrow in the pulse of
our assembly.

The symphony of always often late,
of never found but here and now,
we lose each other only to find ourselves
anew, in the glimmer of a future

not yet              fractal. We laugh
a broken laugh, black joy always
deferred, rendered elusive therefore
explosive when grasped, mouthfulls of

oceans and sinking ships, disavowals
etched into our spines, we reach for
the impossible, the belated, the postponed –—
only to encounter time, the trickster, as it

points to history as rupture. Time, the
record of burying ground, the archive of
loss. The law has been written, the
argument stitched into our stomachs, we

digest in refusal, regenerate in
refusal, gather in refusal of time-keeping,
of history’s record of the inevitability of
asphyxiation, the certainty of trespass –—

We gather and trespass you back.
We gather and trespass you otherwise, black.
We gather and forget all about you.

We gather and remember selves,
scattered and diasporic, pregnant
with songs and prayers, gestures towards the
future, always outwards and elsewhere, never

here. We gather here and breathe in
another place.¹ We gather today in the breath
of time past and tomorrow’s bend towards
an epoch of what it means to repair a

wound as wide as the Atlantic,
injured by borders and legislations,
cobalt and child labor, the afterlife of
slavery² as contemporary as Iphone.

We remain in the fracture. We
linger in the wound and find poem and
practice embroidered in our lineages of
dissent, the chorus of Black women who stand

before and after and among and around
us, excavating the blinding light of
lives lost to the belly of the ocean, the
greed of the European.

We congregate in abundance, around
the dinner table and in the garden where
the harvest is plentiful, where poetry is a weapon,
where voguing is ritual and laughter is

medicine. Our coming together, sacred
as moonbeam. The ragged edges of the
everyday alchemized into silk-like softness,
the embrace of knowing, of being known and

remembered in and through Blackness, 
fractal. The future is our grand-mothers’ daydream,
the sunrise of abolition, the drums
our feet will dance to like heartbeat

remembered lullaby. The future is a place where
black is beyond blues, where the land eats capital
back and sings black, where grief is no longer our
namesake.

Harambec: a future laced in now, a blanket layed
down, a space in the garden where it is quiet

the silence, occasionally interrupted by the
flight of winged laughter.

 

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1 In Another Place Not Here, Dionne Brand
2 Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman