your mother and her sister are calling your name!
We are wearing our tear-dresses now,
for we have walked that Trail.
You are so young, so we will sing to you
the stories we have hidden in our baskets.
We will teach you to plant strawberries
for your wife to find in your garden when you are grown.
We will kiss you in the light
that comes down from Ga-lun-la-ti!
For you are our treasured one,
the one the Great Spirit gave
when he breathed new life into you
with the scent of orange blossoms.
DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA
Mother Africa!
Seated on a stool,
wrapped in kenté cloth,
one baby on your back
and another at your breast,
with the whole African continent
framing your body
like a magical map:
I see your glory,
I enter into your story,
singing the names
of my twin goddaughters,
Akweley and Akuorkor!
Reina and Reneé,
the first a queen,
the second Reborn—
the hope of the future
that cannot be lost.
POCAHONTAS SINGS
I can’t tell you my secret name. Only
my father names me by that name.
I can’t show you how I ran naked before
I was eight or the deerskin skirt I had
at twelve. My turkey-feather winter-cloak
is gone like the sands of time dripping down
the hourglass you keep on your desk.
But I can show you the pot my mother made
with her own hands from the earth by the river
before my father, the Pohowtan, sent
her away to live with another man
in another village, and I never saw
her again. Remember, after you English
came to our shores, women pressed your cloth
into the clay pots to make new designs.
I am my mother’s pot, my flesh is
her living clay, and you, John, have pressed your cloth
into my fabled skin and made me new,
as I, growing big-bellied with child,
lay dead fish in your corn fields to make them grow
for the boy I sing to when you call me
Rebecca, the noose who snared you, and I
call you Isaac when I hold you inside
my soul still turning cartwheels by tide
pools in Virginia, by rivers of water
frothing white over darkened waves where
the ocean meets Tenakomakah lands,
where the ocean from the east meets the river
from the west, north of Jamestown, where
your people first settled, and I fed them
corn and pumpkin seeds when they were dying.
The dying lived, and you came, and brought me
back to the King of England, who danced
with me at a masque as Ben Jonson’s players
revealed a vision of delight, harmony,
and wonder, heralding a spring I will
never see with you, my John, my Isaac:
hold my hand in yours, my husband,
for it is enough that our child shall live.
SOR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ SINGS OF A SWAN
First Portrait
When I was young, the painter came and painted me
beautiful, a book in one hand, my other hand turned out
as if waiting for You to take it and ask me to dance.
But all my secrets were simmering inside me
like spices—like cinnamon—or red pepper
ground to powder and ready to burn your mouth.
My desires were as sweet as a singing swan.
Second Portrait
I went away from the house where I was fostered
and took refuge in a monastery dedicated to Saint Jerome,
and he came again, that painter, and painted me:
sitting in my black and white habit, a wall of books
behind me, one open before me (not the Bible),
my beads wound round my body and dripping down
my shoulder, across my thigh, held in my hand,
but easy to ignore in comparison
to the oval portrait, like a shield of faith, upon
