More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
How then can I deny the woman in me, when my coming to earth was because women prayed for me?
Was I not made from a woman’s mouth? Only father remarks at my petal nature, the women I come from say I am beautiful.
Mama’s song She carried me for a long time. I was in her heart, growing in her mind. Long before I made home in her womb. I was nevanji she prayed for. Years after God had tested her pa...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
You are Oceanic All she wanted was to find a place to stretch her bones. A place to lengthen her smiles and spread her hair. A place where her legs could walk without cutting and bruising. A place unchained. She was born out of ocean breath. I reminded her; ‘Stop pouring so much of yourself into hearts that have no room for themselves. Do not thin yourself. Be vast. You do not bring the ocean to a river’.
Do I tell her our love was young? Because little did I know hearts do not number days as minds do and my heart was an unreachable mainland. I kept an archipelagos of lovers this is what I thought made me.
Judges Why do you wear gown and gavel in your mouth as if you were there when the corners of the universe were drawn?
Woman Would you not be happy if as a woman someone said they can see your brothers and your father in you? So if you see my mother and my sisters in me why should I get offended?
I am not the sum of lovers I had or never had. As for lovers who left, consider them hair. Sometimes you cut it off for it to grow longer and more beautiful (but that doesn’t mean you hate pictures of yourself with it). Even after lovers you remain Beautiful.
You were born to be remembered, not missed. Being missed means you eat up people’s memory leaving them full of you but emtpy of themselves.
My eyes are held at attention
What voice? Tears wrote this. Pain bore this. When you are over-pregnant with fear this is what you give birth to.
When we danced our spiritual journeys assimilated into a rhythm. A rhythm un-imposed. Muscular energy transferred into desire. Haloed with auras growing into a circular rainbow. Bathing in colourful rivers of magic ancient.
Some people will write you the fuck out. And you won’t know whether to cry or laugh. Or run or hide. All you will know is you have never been seen like this. That somebodyyesterdays unknown but beautiful stranger could find your language and explain to you: i. Your soul-tongue. ii. Why the letters in your name are arranged as they are, and then iii. dare to hold your hand and walk you on your journey. And sometimes, you can’t help but fall in love with such a beautiful creature in a way you couldn’t even write about.
I never stayed in fire long enough to know why I yearned for water. And I have burned since. Neither did I understand why I kept foreign gods in my mouth.
Alien I am a stranger on the cold side of the mountain. Where my tongue is a shadow and my lips are ghosts. Here I am a bird with flame coloured feathers A strange spectacle.
And what if there are no coincidences. Only dots we have failed to connect. Moments we have missed. Would you still believe me when I say I remember your laugh from an old dream?
The morning I forgot about you I woke with your heart in my mouth. Your name slipping from my mind and pouring out of my hands.
I’m in love with the way she wears my name. On her lips. In the morning. In between kisses. And especially when she’s laughing.
You don’t realize how uncomfortable your first language sits in your mouth. Not until the day you learn how colonisation was a paedophile who insists on being a parent. So when it’s pointed out, you deny it. When you were wild with young life you denied it - forgive yourself. Those waters were sharp. Today, learn how to mouth language that built conical towers. Re-learn words that clumsily slip out of you. Grow a spine out of your mouth.
The homes away from home are never home enough.