Middle Passage

Reddish pink stripes fill the sky, punctuated by a dropping ball of fire. Deeper storm clouds roll in from the west, colored as purple as the massive bruise on my knee. But it’s the whiff of the dying fish that grabs me and takes me back through the years, as this sharp evening wind moves the poplar branches tonight.

This is the same sunset upon which my childhood memories are built. Thirty years for this sun to rise and blaze and set upon the earth. Thirty years for me to grow and move and change. And I wonder tonight what is the same in myself and in this world, and what has been changed past recognition.

Is the sand that my daughter now shovels filled with grains that touched my chubby young hands so many years ago? Is my water still here, filled with the scent of Ivory soap from bathing in the Bay as a child? What about the shells strewn along the water’s edge? Could they be the same ones I discarded as a girl?

And the bigger questions are about what is still inside me. Do I carry that excitement I see in her face as she splashes in the waves? Or the patience to painstakingly line up her shells in perfect order? What about her belief that anything is possible, that the sun in the sky is glowing just for her?

I’m at a cross-roads now. I can feel it pulsing like those rays of the setting sun. The streaks across the sky and the storm clouds flying east give me pause. This is the middle passage. I cannot make it back to that sweet young girl burying her feet in the sand. And I am not sure where to head. If I follow this horizon line or set out west to chase the falling orb.

The water speaks and the trees give the wind a voice, but I cannot interpret their message. The sun sinks below the horizon and the sky grows redder. I wonder how it can be brighter when the sun is gone. Yet another sign that I cannot understand, just another road I’m not sure how to travel.

So I sit. And I breathe. And I watch these swans and this crane and the snake in the water. And I wait for the instinct, and the courage, and the sign in this flaming red sky.