The Geez by Nii Parkes (little red riding hood read aloud txt) 📕

the Americas,

how you can’t be beholden to the mediocre

for your very intestines are echo chambers

of dreams swallowed under an umbrella of whips.

In the cavern of a kiss, how easily things slide

to the back of the mind – gone, your father’s lessons

on how to fondle fruit, to tease the tender skin

with fingers to fathom the ephemeral line

between ripe and rotten, so you are lost, tumbling

in a vortex of broken promises, guilt trips

and misused savings. This is what becomes of your heart

just before it breaks and you begin to claw back

yourself:

your blood is hybrid; your tongue is mongrel,

you carry songs of refuge – refugee mysteries

in the loom of Maroon shanties that shift language;

your father has been taken, his own father gone,

father upon father, across borders echo

and the sea waves back; your skin is weather beaten

and it absorbs sun, hatred, fire and shea butter –

it doesn’t crack. Summertime and you’re still living;

pick up your pieces by the only light that still

glows – the fading flower of your mother’s smile.

iv

My daughter dives, clean as a lemongrass blade

cut into water and something in her, some sheen

of worry is extinguished as her long arms brush

what was still into acceleration. She comes

alive, her head bobbing in and out between breaths.

My mother’s shoulders unfurl in her butterfly

strokes, my father’s limbs contract every time she turns.

She is calm – luminous in a way I am not

when I swim; I find my release in word and song

instead, knowing sometimes the precise tune I crave

and what souvenirs it carries. Entire affairs

live with me in this way, in gaps between horn solos,

the catch in Ella’s voice before Satchmo’s

refrain

. :

One day my daughter will remember,

as I did when she was born, a long-buried song

that emerges in snippets, swaddled in memory

if you ask me

I could write a book...

nkɛ bo baa ya

nkɛ bo baa ya da daa...

then a melody too

she has forgotten the words for, but flowers still

beneath her lips.

A baby cries, its mouth

a dark, dried fruit, and from somewhere

your entire inheritance of comfort comes

tumbling forth: heartbeat, caress, the first

words that stilled the waters

when you entered the world:

kaa fo.

v

Sometimes a man wakes with Spanish phrases

in his head, with no clear reason beyond a few

hours spent in Madrid, Lima and Buenos Aires.

There is no hand on his chest, no man or woman

calling from another room to ask what he will have

with his coffee, no skin-borne memory of caresses

just

mala hierba, which is a snippet of something

overheard and hablemos de la sensualidad

which he can only imagine is the fruit of a history

of building languages from scraps gathered

in the crowds and markets of Accra, Kumasi,

Cape Coast and Manila: Twi, Ewe, Tagalog, Fantsi.

There might be yet more in the bud

of his heritage: with a great-gran from Fernando Po

and others retrieved to the mother continent

from Guadeloupe, Nova Scotia, Jamaica...

who can ever tell what words he will scream

should he wake and find his head

replaced with flowers, his eyes stamens,

his cheeks a mesh of petals, pollen scattering

every time he speaks.

vi

You learn a thing from one lover, use it on another

and he can tell, like she can tell, some frisson

has shifted, some odd flavour lingers

in the fruit of your release.

The question will be asked

later, when seasons have passed and sunflowers gone

to seed, why you lied about it, why you tried

to juggle with the face of a clown,

creep with an elephant’s step.

Was there no father to whisper to you

at dawn which seed belonged to which plant,

which plant to which seed? No mother

to tutor your mouth to speak its desires

kindly, to tell you your heart does not belong

to the hand that caresses your breast?

By then, no answer will return

the body’s unquestioning surrender

or the harvests of swaying sorghum,

yam (its mounds so difficult to master),

cocoa and the wild hibiscus so trendy now

in West African bars. But know this:

you will always be loved. You will find

your heart does not need the flint

of broken promises to blossom into flame.

vii

One child I planted tomatoes with

because for a time there was a patch

of gardening space and sun; another

spoke beautifully with my tongue,

his eyes set in his grandfather’s face;

a third held me by the mouth

kissed me, caressed my cheek

and said Daddy, making my heart

thud at dawn each time I remember.

There are songs I have sung to all

my children, words I stole from tunes

shaped in the mouth of my mother.

Thus the body is echo chamber

and memory; all its parts triggers,

every bruise history, melody.

I carry all my dreams; not as I imagined,

but the heft holds – every flower has

fallen to yield some peculiar fruit.

viii

Absence is silence he has learned

to endure, but sometimes it breaks

his faith in his own existence, makes him

rephrase questions: if a tree falls in a forest

and you don’t hear it do you exist? Maybe

this is why he hums against the wood

of his own headboard, why it is no surprise

that Amazing Grace is the song

an agnostic chooses

to learn

to play

on his

new

trumpet.

Because it has history that will see him

past the clumsy blasts of air

he tries to tame into something

more than a noise, something

recognisable, something

he has heard his mother sing before

with notes his father played – words alive

in the hymn book that survived

his grandmother; a chain that holds them

all, a link that keeps everyone present

in his struggle – free as wind, breath.

One day his children will laugh at him

when he stumbles demonstrating a somersault

and falls with the thud of soft fruit in the morning.

He will chase them in mock fury and try again

and soon he will find ways of teaching them

things he can no longer do himself, like seed

begat bud and bud, flower – a chain unbroken.

Even talents that have slept within him like French

double Ls, alleles in the helix of his life,

he will pass on, easy as the caress that stripped

their mother’s body, simple as a song

that beyond silence

lives on.

ix

If I speak now of day’s orange retreat and the lily

white of a moon’s rise, it is because

one dusk a kayak will lick the face

of Lake Volta, slick as a boat that once glided,

a man in its belly, towards the flower

of Guadeloupe. In