Absolution
You follow ripe bougainvillaea trellis down thorny paths;
they cut first your conscience, then your flesh: this is absolution.
A black woman, rocking herself between life and death.
After a sigh revealing cheeks caving into cheekbones, she holds you:
join her in song, learn the song you and your upright breasts will soon sing.
Her daughter is a doctor, her son is a lawyer:
sing for stolen green figs hidden under good
intentions, cooked to perfection, for sauce lending
the strength prayer couldn't.
Sing for a pawned body for textbooks she can't
name, for concepts which kick her mind like
the football she bought to make him happy.
Sing because they've left this backwater place
somewhere fourteen degrees north of nowhere.
This is a mother's song: swallowed for decades,
replaced with a gospel the children soon forgot.
Sing, because this is your song.