Birthing Of A Homeland

We yelled

~ s t r a w b e r r i e s ~

on mango streets

and traded siren songs

for bottled up

roselets of night-fields.

And I might have glued some

to your chest,

just to see

if a crayon finger

could come across

some missed lands

that crumpled

into hummingbird clouds

as if our own rain

strummed

newborn streams

and staked it for

stale myrtles.

But through it all,

you slept in the post-scripts

of gazelle eyes

after digging kilometres

of empty poems

awashed in moth paint

or madness,

and asked me to

~ b r e a t h e ~

but I had breathed all my life,

and somehow I knew

you had belonged to my cities

forever

and a minute.

So had I put

a stammering canvas

to use

and sewn a

a hyperbolic memory

of naked feet

yelping cardamom seeds,

the brushes would have

churned their oceans

on a black hole's tips

and bargained it all

to resurrect a

~ h o m e l a n d. ~