SONG OF REMEMBRANCE

Matthew Shenoda

If unshackling were a song

I’d slide my palm on skin

And watch it trail to air

If unshackling were a song

Forgive my days of fullness

In this land of filch, let my wares be witness

Sokar, you who bless these hands with flourish

As my heart is weighed against a feather

Forgive my days of fullness

The bones of possibility, laid to rest

Stratum, the root’s architecture

My map floats in an ocean sweep

And what do we exhume from this great distance?

The bones of possibility, laid to rest

Every time I look to this sea

I am reminded of my own humanity

Every time I shuffle my step

I recall everything that is left

Intrinsic her name

Buried dead her call

Antiquity, enigmatic wonder

History a chafe of surface and burn

Cracked light into woven earth

Who desiccated night?

In the nation of wont

Shading our day from the pelagic road

Stripped the bark of verdure from the day

My body has absorbed this poison

Not like the carcinogens of the world

Flanked by an iridescence

Fraught by the way of home

My body has absorbed this poison

If cartography were a song

Would she dot her notes on the river bottom?

Would she croon her maps on a mountain ridge?

Would her cadence lead us home?

If cartography were a song

I’ll tell a story of life and death

Carve the mask of dignity

Make a place for fire

I’ll tell a story of life and death

Nefer is the land

Stolen in her grace

How she seeps from the wisdom of her own

Made part by the legacy of hunger

The story of wingless birds

Free like the facilities of Africa

The taking of an anomaly

The mapping of rout

Free like the facilities of Africa

Song is a harmony, takes away the road

Disappear, disappear the victim’s map

Before he come undone

One can never tell of wisdom’s knot

Song is a harmony, takes away the road

How the soul does pretend

Refuge in the shade of acacia

Stolen on the land of sand

Loose is the root in decadence

How the soul does pretend

From under this canopy of thirst

Release shall come

This has been the story of sovereignty

This has been the story of hope

Begin Believing

Shift your gaze beyond

Like the order of a midnight office

Say loudly everything that need be said

Train your gate to walk the dark

If every wanderer touched the sky

Was made full by Sah’s direction

Spoken for in another language

Premonition would be our freedom

In the hail of lead fire

We were made to contemplate our veins

Understand the vestiture of desire

Cloaked in an impeding life

In the hail of lead fire

From the sinister gaze of the Atlantic

Its mouth curling with foam

Swept between a desolation

I found my way home

From the sinister gaze of the Atlantic

Whose skin we remember

Borrowed from the stitching of our past

She carried on this wanting

Whose skin we remember

Anticipation

A new land, like sea

Vast like an upward spire, eroding

The pain in your belly, new inertia

And the yearning to forget

Oh son of David

Who croons like silk

And navigates by wander song

Oh son of David

When you first arrive

Stolen is your heart

A memory that locks the past

It is as if no other song had been sung

When you first arrive

If splendid were a tale you tell

You’d speak the past as if it were a dream

You’d praise the pain as if it hadn’t pierced

You’d gather your new neighbors and perjure all the night

If splendid were a tale you tell

And all who came before you

But soon they’d say, but soon

Lackluster in their eyes

Falter in their step

And you rise this way

Greet the morning haze

Blinded by waning recollection

Frightened by the possibilities

Of distance being your home

Oh how we lived too well

Replete with sorrow

I sing the song of empty

Drive the memory from my crown

Heal the land

Like the song of my lungs

Frozen in a space of trace

Captured by a human collapsar

Heal the land

The Acmeists of tomorrow

Must belong beyond this place

Tilling in a new direction

Speaking in a blessed tongue

The Acmeists of tomorrow

The clouds bore heavy rain

A sign of something somewhere

Brazen in its pronouncement

The clouds bore heavy rain

As the plane began

Lifting from its perch

He peered from the window to the land below

Oh, how he longed so quietly to jump

Root himself to vanished earth