I JUST LOST MY WAY

i just lost my way.
i had it once, when i didn't know any better.
My earliest memories, if i go way back to infant times, are blank.
A wall of black.
Like when i'm in a dreamless sleep.
There's no light, no noise, no color, no smell, no movement.
Only a still, airless black.

i'm there in that silent airless black.
But without thoughts, without flesh.
Joined one energy to another, no air between,
i cannot be sundered down through all the millennias.

i've no links here. No involvement, no kinky hair, no caramel skin,
no sexual urge, no community, no foreparents. No hunger to take or
give shape or to resist the shapes the universe, its powers and
polarities impose on me.

Here, in this airless, senseless emptiness,
there's no torment about harvest and things.
No dialectic, no contrasts, no time, no reference points, no
contradictory inclinations, no every day-rhythmic-organic-urge to
expand. No impatient temperament getting in the way. No
interminably long roads, forests and thickets.
And,
most liberating of all,
no impossible dreams - that every day struggle to overcome social
injustice and inequality of opportunity.

When the i who stands before you here withdraws.
Sleep without dreams. There's just black and the i that i am, is lost.
No witnesses to find me and define me narrow.
The narrow that's daylight black.
The narrow that's flat.
One-dimensional.
A shadow.

Where i come from, All is one.
And that oneness is as black as the center of the sun.
As dynamic as the silence of celestial inspiration,
compassion, love, peace, death.

When everything drains off me, All is empty,
wide and deep as my crown chakra
and as black as the known cosmos.

i'm learning to accept i've been lost for longer then i can know.

*

(c) 1997 Ezili Dantò. Excerpt from The Red, Black & Moonlight monologue series, based on Kenbe La! Crossings of a Vodun-Roots Woman by Ezili Dantò. All rights reserved.