Come Home

"Come back South," my mother said on the phone,
"to your people, come back home."
They are my people,
Like rivers moving through continents,
They are my heritage, inheritance,

But I'd been raised up North with judgmental ways
Under scrutiny and microscopic gaze,
Affirmative Action obligated patronage
To this daughter of the Great Migration.

"Come home to your people."
She tugged on the line.
They are my very own, as seed
Belongs in rich black soil,
I belong to them.

Because I was sown in the North,
Didn't taste grits or chitlins until halfway grown,
precluding advantage when
I launched in life,
Didn't take advantage of HBCU's like Spellman or Fisk,
graduated Ivy League, raised three children and then
got two master's degrees.

No farther up the crystal stair did I dare,
Stymied by life's maze of ideas and ideals
Slapped with the sight of
Strange fruit hanging from innocent trees whose,
Weight burdens
Timeless tears unretrieved.

Claimed by neither region when
Mother invited me home,
I'd been away far too long
Singing Northern songs.

In my place in the North, skin too dark
Thoughts shrouded in sequestered dreams,
The South, drew me like a magnet to
Unexplored ancestry.

Proper English found Gullah Geechee dialect and
Black-eyed peas and rice ,
Gospel songs, St. Louis Blues, and New Orleans jazz danced
With cousins, aunts, uncles, and friends,
Sharing centuries' suffering in a glance.

Sometimes I miss MoMA and Central Park
But usher in from hushed white snows
Circlinginthedark
To the South where my people
Endure
Embracing each heart
When
We come home.