“We Did Not Choose The Sea” and other poems by Philo Ikonya

Unrecorded

Stone music
When your music rises
from your grave in flower
and some stones quiver
and sing notes musical
I hear your voice

When music pricks the air
from a needle in friction
and touches the first traction
molecule of air-kissing your ear
I have memories

When your words attach a molecule
of air to another and in you we
breathe, sing and live in hope
when we cannot forget we rise
I sing my soul your language

Our hair is proud and sings on air
When loving is truly spoken
It is in your ear in seconds
in your heart and mind and soul

Add warmth and fire to it
Your own interpretation original
Your body moves in dance
Still you rise, still you rise, dance
and fall and rise from the grave in flower.

 

---

Weave your joy

With the tips of your fingers
And all of you like the
Orchestra conductor knows that music
Know your body:
Its heart drum
Piano toes…

The epic of weavers undaunted
the road to the market is mine
my head is a carrier of universes
I know my step is in space
and those arrows you see on my cloth
have known many lights…
nights and colors

Recognition that ignites
when that face you see again out of nowhere comes
Suddenly feelings surge
blow and rage a real storm
inside
Heart shaken like a vessel love-filled bubbles
Feel every nerve awake
Blood rush blush…
Something lost now
rare since a screen touch keeps
telling where and how you are
Soon surprise will be ancient human feeling…ouch!

 

---

trembling dreams

You wake me up each time
but I dream on with hope
You tell me children cannot
eat dreams in a poem
But when I look I see them
only clad in dreams
the only pants they wear
that you cannot tear

I have sat and mended endlessly
and washed with tears
things mention would tear this paper
things surfing in my soul

Come again, enlarge my spirit
into dreams and let me sleepwalk
and stalk in my talk so many ghosts
Until I ring my bell of peace
and you fall out of your fantasy
and see saints sainting without fainting.

 

---

We did not choose the sea

philo 6.1.2014

When we found them washed ashore
they were barely alive but still breathing
We spoke for the voiceless they
said, many times, and now speak to us
and for us and with us share this breath

We shuddered at life’s turns and twists
when the madding crowd kicked them hard
They slave them again, they do, their voices
deadly drilling the stones so alone intone.

 

---

Longing

Solitary times teach
so loudly that silence
grows so deep and speaks
a new language: And now
Let me see my love, let me
hear my hope, touch my faith
Let me taste our belonging in fragrance
It has been so long and I have
a new alphabet to share with life.

 

---

Come

You come closest
to my chest and tell
me in my own tongue
that you are my latest thought
the fount sings unending
the ocean rises as the rivers dry
and we see the stones still
washing and washed

Humans never understood
color then, never not in
all those matches in design
Not in all those pastels in
cake and bathroom tiles

Not in all that whiteness
and darkness in the broods of life
We so challenged by the sun
without which we wither
think
color must be bright
and I know
that we have not understood color
Cold
We have not got it in color
We attach to it not the warm sound
that leave our mouths to cut the air
frightened of it we are when it rains
purple
and now we know that sign
like we have worshipped the rainbow
for years.

 

---

 

Round the rock

Roots then finding
their way blindly down
trying you
to pass they go this way
and that
through soil finding you
and hugging you

You sing to them the
song of beginnings you
play for them the sound
of the music of their birth
the sign of life
Do not be sad you are
not in a foreign land you tell
them as they move

Rain
falling finds those still
thrusting roots

Yours of stone
you have them
and the roots of a tree
carrying generations into
this other freedom so hidden from
our eyes
that the place of gray we think
but we never understood

Here to go, everyone has a visa
given by the first cry, your life and
friction before in your forbearers
Here to go, everyone, is in song

Hug us rock and break us
as we broke you, break our wood
and if we are ashes, kiss us rock
and let your hardness be the crook
of Our Mother’s arm, so soft

We Did Not Choose The Sea and other poems © Philo Ikonya