Kyndall Flowers reads her poem, "Kitchen, After Rumi's Guest House."
Throughout this election season, NPR and its member stations have been having a collective national conversation called “A Nation Engaged.” The project has looked at central themes in this year’s election, including this week’s question:
What does it mean to be American?
For our contribution to the project, we put this question to some promising young spoken word artists.
Today, we bring you a poem entitled Kitchen, After Rumi’s Guest House by Kyndall Flowers, a 17-year-old student at Ann Arbor’s Pioneer and Community High Schools.
Kitchen, After Rumi's Guest House, by Kyndall Flowers
I.I swear
this afro is a family tree
every curl its own line of lineage
twisting
tangling around each other beautifully
too often violently
but here
on my black head
and my mommas
“I ain't white
my whole family’s just light”
Black head
my “no I’m not mixed
and we don't call it creole”
Black head
and my daddy just
capital B Black
Black like
didn’t run fast enough
Black
farthest back is South Carolina slave Black
Black like
I can hear my ancestors whispering
my real name to me
from the hair behind my ear in my sleep
I can never remember it in the morning
II.
I swear
this afro is an ocean grave
every wave a new chance to leave
something for the tomb
my hair looks so good in salt water
like it finds home in ocean
thats funny aint it
Black girls hair find home in the ocean
like its always more comfortable in the atlantic
like there it rests in peace
it reaches out behind me when i swim
tumbles through the waves
like its trying to hold on to the currents
if i let it it’d drag me down
all the way down till it reached something familiar
twist around a black girl's skull
and tell me she’s my cousin
and I’d stay there underwater
swimming in all that blue and Black
breathing in all that lost language
floating around their waterlogged lungs
I think I’d take a rib back up to shore
try to grow a girl from it
try to bring back a generation
III.
I swear
this afro is a guest house
every knot its own great depression
you should see how much pulled hair i’ve
flushed down the toilet
trying to rewrite history
with a fine toothed comb
pik out what ain't pretty
the guests that live here and don't pay rent
and be too loud
and don't clean up
the guests so heavy they bent my back
forced their way into my roots
and pushed out of me a graveyard country
there is too much blood and earth
caked onto my scalp
my grandmother tried to wash it away in the kitchen sink until
she recognized some of the bodies in the dirt
it gets heavier
every day a new tragedy makes a home on my head
drips blood into my eyes
turns everything red
I pik my hair out
try to make space for them in all of this thick
and I would be grateful for whoever comes
if each had been sent as a guide from beyond
but I would much rather them be guides here
playing with toy guns and selling cigarettes on the corner
walking home and listening to music
I want to pour the blood back into the bodies
the air back into the lungs
re-set the bones and
none of this ever happened
How does it feel?
To wake up light
To be the carried and the carrier
To taste freedom and not also taste blood
Salt
Sweat
To have it go down easy
To sing the national anthem and not choke on it
To watch the flag and not the rope
To see blue and not see red on black
I swear
this Afro holds a country
a generation
a civilization
hand me the big comb and the oil
get comfortable
let me introduce you
to all of the history that
made home on this
Black
scalp
Kyndall Flowers is a student at Pioneer and Community High Schools in Ann Arbor.
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