I want to gather my caftan with a thousand boats of resistance bobbing and wobbling on waters of meaning underneath my fabric. I want us to set them free to sail and crash and sometimes capsize and sometimes jump the waves. Tie strings of remembrance that swirl with color and dislodge from weather and time and forgetting, strewn into the water, which is the unconscious. There will be toads and clams and seahorses. Porpoises and whales and jellyfish. Mussels and tortoises and old, slow sharks who are losing their teeth. There will be resonances on coral from the animals, reverberating off the boat bottoms too. Penetrating the depths and stirring whitecaps on the crests of the water. The sounds are the echoes of our ancestors, the faces and histories we turned away from loving but are still our people. Our origin story, our present.
I want us to love one another, but it’s hard when God’s finger dips into the water. Presses down and sucks our fertility, claims it for his own. We are before his time; we go deeper.