Molasses/Omi Adura
by SHAUNA M. MORGAN
in Spring 2017
JD Malone, "Home" (2015)
Molasses
Dem tell mi seh di birtin did hard,
life torn from my mother who squatted
in the dirt, back against the trunk
of a soursop tree, the one she often stole
away to, drawing circles in the soft ground
calling up root weevils when her fingers
were a plaid of sugar-caned skin
and blood.
There they found me mounted
on her left breast suckling death,
covered in sex and a vernix of ghosts,
her hands holding my back,
navel-string still hitch on, tie up inna har.
Mi madda nevah know weh di rainbow mean,
she was buried along with my
most beautiful scars, the afterbirth
always beckoning me home to
witness the memories of old folk,
their songs and stories marking my flesh,
echoing something my bones find familiar,
a chord that reverberates through my hips and thighs.
She come dung faas like fiyah inna canepiece,
they say, always turmoil in what they tell,
and I cannot be sure if they are speaking of my birth
or what my mother endured growing me
between rows of cane, light brown child
pressing against her molasses, a bitter confection
made with indelicate hands.
Omi Adura
We are standing at the shore.
It could be Adelaide, first free village,
Salvador or Varadero, Fairy Hill,
or anywhere the Caribbean reaches
for the sorrowful Atlantic.
Our faces turn up to receive
the sharp caress of the wind.
We fill our nostrils with salted air
and walk into waves
breaking gently at our ankles.
Hand in hand and slowly swaying
our bodies into the uprising of the sea,
we step over sea stars and urchin,
follow the path of conch and spirit,
life-force of our ancestors.
She pulls us, swirls around
as we sink ourselves down
to our necks, water across
our shoulders washing us
and lapping up to kiss our lips.
We submerge, wash our torn
selves clean and new,
cry out to all our mothers,
to Yemanja. We are her children
too, like fish feeding all directions.
The author of Fear of Dogs & Other Animals, Shauna M. Morgan is a poet and scholar who springs from a rural district in Clarendon, Jamaica and holds an enduring love for the Diaspora about which she writes. She teaches creative writing and literature of the African Diaspora at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and her current research focuses on representations of womanhood and Neo-anticolonialism in 21st-century literature. Her poems were shortlisted for the 2011 Small Axe literary prize, and recently won honorable mention for the 2016 Salem College International Literary Awards Rita Dove Prize. They have appeared in ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Anthology of Appalachian Writers Volume VI, Interviewing the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Her critical work has appeared in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and South Atlantic Review. Shauna lives in Virginia with her 11 year-old twin daughters. Learn more about Shauna at godfleshbackracloth.com
