By P.D. “Phoenix YZ” Battle

I began in the below where it smolders,
like Georgia heat,
more sticky and hot than crying eyes
with cotton needle lashes
in the south.
Deeper than pots made for collards to be cooked in,
deeper than boats
slaves got shipped in,
swallowed like ancestor tongues
burned with hot grits.
Stinging and screaming,
whips cracking
a great crevice in the ocean’s floor.
Something must have abandoned me,
planted me there,
just a pain filled seed
growing in the dark walls and flesh floors
of the universe.
Cradle rocking in its womb,
swaddled in lowness
cause being that deep
that down
feel pretty bad.
Quietly searching misery
for the song of myself,
listening to hear
what I should become,
stillness whispers
“every good feeling starts with a heart beat”.
Like a loose drum
seeking repentance in the wind,
I start with the pound of myself,
playing sorrowful riffs
in rounds
that fill me and this earth
with an umbilical sound
is Black,
with every color trapped inside.
Dancing inside the hums of my mind I decide
I must be music,
and squeezed from the earth
like oil
from the peelings of good fruit.
Rubbed my essence
into the skins of the black people
I found digging and cropping
my birth lands for salvation.
These slaves turning fields into church lands,
dripping tears like libations.
Shoveling and plowing
Shawshank tunnels to a place where they can belong.
They needed nature nurturing them safely home.
They needed me, this music in their songs.
If you stir something long enough,
it will spin on its own.
Life comes, lives and goes,
life comes
lives
and goes.
They moaned me to death,
in a dirge that only orphans could sing.
Buried me with the breath of life
in cremation ashes
more fertile than the soil
I sprang from
and I grew into a tree.
Whose branches
stretch into bridges that bring together,
soul sounds
that ring together,
freedom hymns.
Telling stories of survival,
like the mother
I never had.