It is surreal how the rupturing is immortal. The way bodies break apart something furious. The way children climb their way in and through us. Isn’t it strange to be a portal? Isn’t it strange to know your children have been waiting for you long before you knew of them? Birth carries its own cosmic abilities. And even when the birth doesn’t happen, the beings follow like ghosts. I know you know the losses. How they detach you from your very body. The way being taken away from a homeland might, yet different because the taking makes you wonder if you were ever alive. If you were alive enough to make something else alive. I want you to know that I know what it feels like to miscarry, write a poem about it, and bury all the evidence. They call this time of your life, the lost years. Meaning there was a time you were swallowed up by grief. And it is in grief that I’ve learned there is no reconciling. In grief I’ve learned that a body is only a body and that there is something hopeless about being a person. Hopeless enough to question God. And you know this questioning well, even when you wrote poems about an acceptable God. A friend once told me they wanted to have children because there are Black people in the future. You must have known this too. You wrote so much of divinity; you must have seen your own imminence. You must have seen something abundant. The babies, the poetry. The babies, the poetry. In darkness you were birthing, futures forever raveling. 

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