BACK THEN


- Yusef Kumenyakaa


I've eaten handfuls of fire

back to the bright sea

of my first hipbone of memory

& saw a wheel of birds

a bridge into the morning

but that was when gold

didn't burn out a man's eyes

before auction blocks

groaned in courtyards

& nearly got the best of me

that was when the spine

of every ebony tree wasn't

a pale woman's easy chair

black earth-mother of us all

crack in the bones & sombre

eyes embedded like beetles

in stoic heartwood

seldom have I needed

to shake a hornet's nest

from the breastplate

fire over the ground

pain tears me to pieces

at the pottery wheel

of each dawn

an antelope leaps

in the heartbeat

of the talking drum


from  I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head.
Copyright @1986 by Yusef Kumenyakaa.
Wesleyan University Press,
by permission of University Press of New England.