Landscapes

Image © ParashforPeople

I belong to a distant land right across

a river that paints a valley with

a different colour every time someone kisses

someone by its side.

My first kiss, a nervous peck on my cheek

a promise of togetherness and fighting

the world with our power as if we had started

a global crisis, I remember…

I belong to a distant land right across

a river that creates music at night

when my Mum translates my father’s

exhaustion into a platter embellished

with smoked eggplants, I often hear

the river composing a note

worth dancing to, I remember…

I belong to a distant land right across

a river that taught us how to forgive

not long before I unlearned as

I entered manhood, forgetting

lividity crumbles you in ways not worth

imagining, and forgiveness recreates us

in ways worth preserving, forgetting

that the river shall double up its guilt trip

for it couldn’t flow inside of me long enough

to keep me sane, forgetting

those stories that illustrated my dreams

of enduring my first kiss by its side, and I…..

Remember,

Knowing completely I now cannot be who I was

and dare not seek refuge in the galaxy

of its ever escalating embrace, yet I,

I belong to that same distant land right across a river