Winner: RITE OF PASSAGE
When we talk about horses, we talk/ about things too beautiful to forget/ & too slippery to remember.
West Africa, 1973
When we talk about horses, we talk
about things too beautiful to forget
& too slippery to remember. How is it
that a man’s body is a shrine & not a farmland?
In the legend of the first flood,
every horse was a sick bird inside a dead tree.
No one knew Night was capable of beauty
in the year of the snake. They say I must not eat
eggs. I must drink only from the mouth
of snails. Behold, girls my age cannot even tell
the innocence of water. They set the ocean
on fire & let its smoke consume my baobab tree.
Ask what boy was not already fatherless
when the body calls the finger in its throat a knife
& I will ask what mothers tell their daughters
what fathers must not tell their sons? Here,
we talk about horses as if they were
only slippery not beautiful. We remember
the sick bird but forget the dead tree inside where feathers
become wings. Is a cloud still not a prediction
of vanishment? In the year of my sprouting hips,
they say I must burn every truth that will not take root.
I must talk about Night as if it were capable of beauty.
