Home at the end of another world…
I hid in my mothers’ womb,
Curled and turning in suspended animation
waiting for the right time
but when the bombs fell at Hiroshima
Nagasaki
Why did I ever come out into this world?
At this time?
The flames
The screams
The stench
Silences
Heartbeats
&
Destruction?
But there…in the dining room
In a brownstone
On the south side of Chicago
My grandmother’s jasmine spirit
Billowed & blew in the sheer white curtains
Hot whispers of spring
In the greening
In the blooming
My mother & father entangled:
Sweat, breath, flesh
Thrust, twist, grips, caresses
Little deaths
And the world spinning
Turned and turning
My spirit said
YES!
To a new year
To A new day
Now is the time!
& 9 months later
I awakened in dreamtime
Between darkness & light
Between yesterday & tomorrow
Old year & new
…Now here we are at Fukushima
“The Blessed island”
Rocked by tsunami & earthquakes
Pouring poison
Fukushima, Hiroshima, Fukushima, Hiroshima
And the fire burned this time
So I am born again
With my own song
Known & knowing
From lifetimes of experience
That the darkest hour
Is still just before the dawn
And I return to
Abyssinia!
Louis Alemayehu
10/8/2013
My last name means “I see the world.” It’s an Ethiopian name I took as a young man during the Black Arts movment, when a lot of us were dropping family names that were reflective of our captivity through the slave trade and reclaiming cultural roots through a new name. This blog is a journal that reflects a life transition and also reflects global transformation. It’s both personal and global, documenting a journey from Minnesota to Ethiopia, which I look at as pulling together multiple threads in my life and focusing how I walk through the world. I’ve been a teacher for a large part of my adult life. Now what’s going to inform my teaching and my activism is my relationship to Buddhist Dharma, without being dogmatic but valuing it as a practice that helps to be present, to act in a way that affirms the interconnection of all life and to live in a way that does no harm. I see my trip to Ethiopia is a trial — stepping into a completely different environment and seeing how it may reveal some hidden assumptions I have about myself and the world.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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