A cataclysm of reckonings

I am a black woman…

…a mother, an incarnation, a testament of those gone before me. I am an oracle for my daughters’ daughters’ daughters; my sons’ son’s sons.

My round black body, my touch, my scent, my ever whitening hair, my breath, my voice, my listening and speaking, my hearing and brazen deafness, my giving and receiving, my loving and loving failures, my forgiveness and failures to forgive, my chronicling of these times is my insistence, my persistence, my resistance, my open rebellion to live and love and  create in the face of  the universal threat of my annihilation in the U. S. and beyond.

When I am living a life of action, consciously and conscientiously, in the face of that threat, I am new spun and carded wool that has been stretched, twisted, braided and fashioned into mooring ropes of over four centuries of enslavement, captivity, torture, dismemberment, death, and terrorized crippling servitude and silence. These ropes have been thickened and fashioned for rescue and healing and hope laden use. These ropes are passed from generation to generation as are lynching ropes. With them we catch, haul up, save, heal, teach, bury the dead honorably and respectfully, and guide us along the constant roads, plains, rivers, mountains, and seas of our sacred humanity, obligation, and promise to hang moons, fling the stars, and save worlds.

I am a cataclysm of reckonings for the incalculable inhumanity, depravity, exploitation, occupation, enslavement and slaughter of Indigenous and African peoples’ and lands.

My daughters, my granddaughters, my great granddaughters, my sons, my grandsons, my great grandsons, blood kin and chosen kin, named and unnamed, known and unknown are the unsuspected impossible sparks in cold ash igniting the skeins of four centuries of deferred freedoms and promise.

Andrea R. Canaan

© 5.19.2021