"Ndoko" *.

"Ndoko" *

   Blackness is more than beauty
   It is wings on water
   Two Ba birds
   In flight to Kemet

   -Twin shoulders, black Kilimanjaros
   To the valley and slope of her neck

   Her skin is health to my fingers
   Diasporic marble, sands of disrupted kingdoms
   Melted to dark sugar
   Organic, untainted

   Full lips
   Whose touch blow through my body
   As if I were made of bed sheets

   Wisps of dry grass tangled in our hair
   From sleeping in the savannah
   Our soft drumming
   Rising butterflies from tall grass

   I tear the tendons of this language
   And pile them on her altar
   The smoke
   Simmering the red sun

   We turn over
   Our indigo spilt from the night-sky
   Tar-love in the fields

   Our Blackness is more than beauty
   It is two Ba-birds circling the horizon
   Parallel

   Until the dip
                  The dive
                                   The vanishing

   Into blackness

* The Ngbandi say the heartbeat (Ndoko) is a water bird bobbing in and out of water