photo by Alex Lear

WHO TRAVELS WITH THE NIGHT

Who travels with the night? We all do. Deep within ourselves we carry distrust and doubts, and these negativities fuse into our molecular specifics, a merger that not only permanently mottles the walls of our memory but also causes questions to be randomly released by totally unrelated happenings: for instance, the hue associated with two or three of us stealthily gathering dark brown pecans out of the tall, uncut grass; stuffing the oval-shaped, sharply-pointed spheroids into our jacket pockets; and then hopping the fence and laughing together while cracking the hard shells with a small hammer and eagerly eating those crunchy but soft seeds we had flinched from our neighbor’s back yard; that and meeting a date at Loretta’s Praline shop on Frenchmen Street on some soft autumn evening a half hour or so before sunset. Some how the colors of those two different experiences connect together and make me think of the shape and shade of my mother’s eyes, the same eyes that looked at my brother with such tenderness the time he was sick, and had a rough time of it, coughing, repeatedly, seemingly unendingly, coughing hard coughs, hacking up a slimy greenish-gray stuff which she, our mother, patiently wiped away with a hand-cloth while pressing a cool, moist towel to his forehead, leaning over him like a protective willow tree on a hot day. I’ve never forgotten the way she looked directly at me when I asked if he was going to be alright, and the motion her eyes made as she lowered them back to his, and gently touching his cheek she simply said, yes, god willing, and both at that moment and always since that moment I questioned why would god not be willing to let my brother live.

—kalamu ya salaam