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A poem
It’s Not That I don’t love You
A.A. Clarke
It’s not that I don’t love you
lone star.
By all accounts you birthed me
during the dry season you set my brown skin in your
red
dust
I rolled in it, tasted of it,
people could smell it on my skin,
my breath,
I reeked of you
I plunged
my hands into you
and built castles from your clay,
whole villages in fact—mad,
mud huts and palaces
baked hard in the equatorial heat.
I was you.
The best of you
and alas
your heathen, ugly face.
The best of you; Pearl of Africa,
rich, yet forever poor
a beckoning beach of shifting sand
you called,
as a mother would
to suckle at your breast
of grain and green,
rain and roots,
of ever short-lived joy.
your mirror has a face
or two,
(one is mine, ours)
the other is petty, small,
self-serving and full
of pompous sacrifice.
you murder your elders
and you kill your wise men,
your milk is soon to sour
even at your finest moment
I’m not so sure of you;
The Metamorphosis is Kafkan.
your Iron is just a myth:
a figurehead
guided by a serpent’s hand.
And furthermore,
you don’t love me as I once loved you.
I sung your odes for years,
bore you like a badge
over land and over
sea
but
I have since outgrown your insolence,
and
your unremarkable pride.
You have successfully anesthetized me.
And so I wash your dust from my skin
(I am not unaffected by this).
It is my beginning
again.
Seeing not through the dark glass
but the
clear diamond shine;
I see the blood on your hands,
the stones in your rice,
the black on your soul
scored with a sharp, hot thing.
and what is left
does not wash away with water
or heal with time
I am un-breaking my heart of ache,
displeasure,
fear and distrust.
Relearning what I’ve always known,
as well as many new things.
And since I cannot yet change you,
I must change me.
But remember,
It’s not that I don’t love you.
What a powerful poem.