Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

flying home: igbo landing 

after lionel hampton

when i tell you 
how our skin will
reflect off water
how our bones won’t sink
i know you’ll understand
not everyone has lived
with screaming fits
& carved-face visions
this time our dreams 
snapping fingers
& let me tell you
of cleansing

da da da
da da da da
da da da
da da da

the color of this
memory    waist deep
in anointing
& oh my kindred
how we’ll stride
into water
not touched by drowning
or held breath    our clothes dry
folded & laid
in history’s basket
let me tell you     kindred
it’s only a lindy hop
to God’s
right-handed shore

flying home
i promise you i’ll
be right there
look for me

enslaved africans mutiny aboard the jolly bachelor

c. winter 1742

cackle     cackle     lick
     these shackles     beat your 

skull until the nub
     weeps mercy     break your bones

the glass you use to see 
     your idiom of blessing

cackle     drum     cackle     mother
     cackle     home     we need

to sail back home     we won   
     white man     eat this ax

steer this ship
     wave to land friendly to us 

cackle     call us savages
     we’ll teach you some songs

yes     hear those songs     riposted
     figures of maps

cackle      we are kin
     cackle      didn’t you drink 

dame’s milk     the same as us
     a slave     a slave     a slave     a slave

now     scream & plead
    & claw the deck

& greet those sharks
    in the stutters of your god

we will pray for you

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is author of the novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois. An Oprah’s Book Club pick, Love Songs was long-listed for the National Book Award in Fiction, and featured on over a dozen “Best Books of 2021” lists, including those of The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, NPR, TIME, and The Washington Post. An award-winning poet, her fifth poetry collection, The Age of Phillis, was long-listed for the National Book Award in Poetry, and won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work: Poetry and the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. Jeffers holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English at the University of Oklahoma.