Opened
The lift doors open and reveal me to you,
and you to me buried as you are in your burqa.
Why hide you? my question veiled in my smile at your baby.
I’m absent in presence when you pull me from my mind-cave-
wildly waving at the panel. You need me
…….to get to your floor.
And your black-eyed, black-haired kids stare slack-jawed while your nanny
…….sniffs showing disdain.
Them we ignore, for heroes don’t ride lifts and mothers are realists, if nothing else
Hurdling down a dark shaft
…….we work together to make it right
We needn’t talk to explain ourselves:
……we are not products set out for their approval
……we both shed scarlet
Buried in our chests we bear
the necessity of love, and the answer of hope,
which, more than water, is life’s most basic necessity.
Charged up on chemistry and on superstition, all our systems in disarray and crumbling.
This is how we see the end:
our old grinding world is drowning
…………………………………….in blood and irony.
But we’ve become joint forces of love,
…………reproducing right here, a fingertip’s microcosm of shalom, of wholeness
…………stronger than all the shattering objections outside the lift’s walls.
I alight giving a good-bye as Salaam and your reply is a smile that blazes from inside,
as you open to the entire world a brilliant flash of white held concealed buried in the cave of black cloth.
Awakened I feel my numbness passing from a dull self. I have forgotten                                                        that anything valuable is always, and only, as someone put it:
blood and heat and hair.

– A Charity Johnson