Immigrant Invocation

Whose hair, like falling leaves and floating embers

Echoes the same fleeing passage of my

Mother's forgotten family,

Across relentless raging oceans on perfect promises of peace

In ships that stank of sea sickness and dank, decomposing carcasses.

I am calling on Corn Mother

Who with strong Southern winds

And a stifling Summer Sun

Can cultivate the sweetest scented starch

To sustain her savage sons when the hunt has gone cold

And the rain only brings them sorrow.

I am listening to the tying of knots

As the monks print them on pages of a Holy book,

And the unraveling of the ropes that were used

To tie the fates of the unfaithful

As leashes around their narrow necks.

I can hear the auctioneers

Selling the Sowers of the slave masters' seed

And smell the price of a cotton picker's plump, pregnant wife

As she's pulled off of the bargain block

And tied to a barrel of barley brew

In the back of a red wheeled rotting wagon.

I will dance a ring around the fiercest fall fire for you, your family,

And for me.

I will dance another ring for the

Scalps of the wicked,

The wayward warriors' weapons,

And the roots of this tremendously tall but tired tree.