Phalanx (Woman's Work)

They talk of blak matriarchy

I feel it every day

The only blak matriarchs I know

Would refuse that title

With an explosive cackle

It speaks nothing

Of the daily sacrifice

Of the undying capacity for love

The smoothed creases

The made bed tight as a drum 

And the pathological worries

However they wrapped it 

Nanahm, means sister

She is the head of the phalanx

Of black women

Who made everything

And what they didn’t manufacture with their own vascular hands

They could fix

No man needed

(They disappear anyway)

Grandma could reel in four and five at a time

Perched on the sea wall on the Tweed River

Every day except for Sunday

Black bream was her specialty

Enough to feed a blak army

They’d hear her speaking lingo

From the next room

But never invited in

Do you know what it is

To live with fear

As constant as breathing?

Nanahm feared God

It gave rhythm and melody to her life

She couldn’t read or write

But knew the good book verse and chapter

A pillar of the church

She held everything up

Even the broken notes as she strained to sing 

Granny Hannah didn’t have a tribal name

No totem either

We think of paucity

What they didn’t pass on

When we owe them the air that we breathe

Granny grew up on Stradbroke

Destined to be farmed out as domestic help

But you can’t train

An incandescent spirit

Laced with steel

Wrapped in an iron will 

They say Granny birthed most of the Gooris around here

Well - they used to say anyway

Any time

Day or night

The call would come

She’d hitch up that horse and buggy

And soon she’d be flying 

Out of Hannah’s Hill, a sand dune near South Golden 

Faster than a King parrot

A chipped blue tea service

Aunty Marg Iselin remembered

The gift of her employer

A big pastoral station out west somewhere

A clay pipe

Expert horsewoman (or I am misremembering)

And her basket weaving

In blood quantum terms

Granny Alison was full

Her self-loathing country doesn’t know itself

Always flattening the past

To raise shining hollow monuments to the present

That will be obsolescent in a decade

Like Pop, Granny didn’t like to have her photograph 

Taken

No one could steal her light

Like her thumbprints

But if I could just see her

I could well imagine 

What really fires the synapses in my brain

The sheer 

Undiluted

Power

Of a blak woman standing alone

Only moved 

By the restless jarjum churning in her belly

A woman’s work is done