International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and UNESCO World Poetry Day
“My blood swims in every
water way, every tributary
between here and the Delta
Layers of my lineage are pounded into
hot red clay, tint the ring of trees,
are hewn across the scarred fields of southern farms.
From the striving metal of plows and guns,
shifting whorls of fingerprint echo across state lines on
train car railings and travelling shoes,
sacks and cases clutched in hands,
rare and luminous keys and pens;
I know our blood runs over and under the dirt;
that our ghosts get louder as you
follow down the Ilinois
Central Line, and along its
connections…
from Mississippi and Tennessee
tracking north
and leaning
on the sun
My family is not a tree, but a river
Four streams in before our story gets lost
in the din of the Mighty Mississippi,
on to ancestor oceans, impossibly vast.
My great, great, great-grandmothers are likely
Mollie
Missouri
Malvina
Adeline …
Features inked out
by the Blackness of their living
Details erased
by the whiteness of record.
I know you are written somewhere: name
and story:
planters’ ledger
colonizer’s census
family bible
newspaper
or grave …
I need to know
and speak your names.”
A Black Daughter Speaks of Rivers by Atena O. Danner, Unitarian-Universalist minister
Chorlton Unitarians 