Zoning (for MMB).

In the wild zone, we wait and watch and pray. A small, golden voice, delicate as a fairy flower, Some lady's slipper shaft of rain-forest sunlight Speaks up to me, "We are African-American people." "Yes, we are," I answer; "yes, we are."

In a cosmos of double veils, every answer is twain: We own this space, if nothing else, and fill it With twinkling stars and cymbals, common buttercups, Fire from John Henry's hammer, and cascades of bubbles, Baptized and baptizing, in the spirit.

Who are we who are known and not known? Who speak in light-stick riddles of river rock And kiss the kiss of family, finding in each answer Not two more questions, but three? From what far, Distant place did we come to enter here?

We inhabit this space, we walk the walk together. We wear the same name; cut, we bleed the same blood. In this zone, the unconscious is awake as the Red Sea, Parted. Enter lightly, the physics of this world. In the wild zone, we wait and watch and pray.

Joanne M. Braxton is a poet and scholar who lives and works in Williamsburg, Virginia. "Zoning" was written for her daughter Mycah. Braxton is author of Sometimes I Think of Maryland (1977), a collection of poetry; Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition (1989), a genre study; and an edition of The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1993).