Extracts

I am the last of a line.....
DEAR DIARY
i am the last of a line
it stops here with me

this is where the estuary
of an African slave ends

no children, as yet, to pass the blood on
to flow over the smoothed rocks
of an ancestors foundation

 last of a line, a woman
with a story of multiple life stories
 of how we came to be here

of how this world's history branded me,
an old empire coughed me out
of its system as I squirmed, a free radical

that came into its own,
by detoxing self aberration, to sight
myself with eyes of love and becoming

the thorn in the throat  of a giant, a clot
needing surgical removal,
from the brain of cultural tyranny,
oppressing, my sex, my skin, gifting me
with rebelliousness in words and art.

I am the last of a line
standing here, as a writer, storyteller
and i invite you, as friend (you can 'unlike' me later)

i invite you along the journey of a self, soul,
an artist, a woman, a human, a cliche,
a label, an icon a stereotype, a problem,

an infestation,  a migration, an exotic, negrotic,
a slave, a negra, a breeder, a nigger,
a mammy, a maid, a matriarch with no human rights,

a golly, a wog, a coloured, a black, a negro (empowered)
a niggah bitch, a ho yet Mother to the the world
a Queen, my own logo, with an askewed crown

a dichotomy of existence knotted into my frown
schizophrenic with possibilities
and still STILL, as i reconcile my status as the last

i try to pin it down, this 'I, me, self"
so  i look to  my left
to my father, bereft of the familiarity of his breath

to my right, to stand in the light
and shade of my mothers lashes
as she blinks the ash from my eyes

that i might see Woman
and smile at her from the mouth of overstanding,
into the depths of her whirling and drum
flying dreds and pussy song

to the food in the veins of beasts and babies full grown
from the milk of her Soul and sated gravaliscious libido.
Maybe being the last is better thing

than I've believed in the past
the legacy cuts deep
 gripped open at the edges by fragments

of memories, holding on so not fall back
into bright brutal cycle  of re-memory
 of a blood line interrupted

the buck stops, starts here

written by Zena Edwards 2011©


Virtually all of Travelling light has been devised  and inspired from diary entries which I have kept since I was a young girl. Some are verbatim Click to go directly to more show extracts on the TL's blog.