I know my bones are as old as you.
a poetic-transmission from Stanage Edge 🇵🇸
Stanage Edge looking towards Derwent Water, Peak District. Image by Dal Kular
“We have to throw everything we have as writers against the machine invested in the unmaking of meaning. You know what, we might fail, but the greater failure is to not attempt it, to simply look away and talk about how beautiful the moon is.”
Omar El Akkad, writer.
Hello lovely folks. As Spring sings loud and radiant here in Yorkshire, I’m feeling blessed by sun rays and blackbird song. Yet, my heart is proper heavy too. Palestine. Palestine. Palestine. Right now, I’m not sure what words to say because I’m not sure what the language is for absolute horror that is beyond horror.
Instead, I’ll share a poem with you ~ I know my bones are as old as you ~ that I created almost a year ago for my residency with Black Nature in Residence 2. This poem arrived as a download ~ a transmission from somewhere-everywhere ~ we are all each other everywhere.
I put my ear on the rippled skin of stone edge. I listened. And transcribed…
Listen to ‘I know my bones are as old as you’
Dear Stanage Edge,
I know my bones are as old as you. I lay my cheek down on your cool
crinkled slabness, one piece of a gritstone scrawl disappearing far off and I
hear you whisper – hello, I know you too.
You tell me how to know you and how, my bones are yes, as old as you.
My bones, regenerate over and over, make over and over, made of the same
elements as you. I rise up. This skeletal frame – bone muscle blood nerve
personality soul a brain. I’m a speck of somethingness made of fallen star
particles, birthed by Seven Mothers of Africa, or by a place that didn’t have a
name back then or land ownership claimed. Seven Mothers of Earth.
I know my bones are as old as you because where else could I have come
from? Repeated through the thousands of years? But were they years back
then when the origins of blood made that trace of me, and made me into
part of you, you into part of me? I listen to the stone edge because the stone
edge tells me – like you, I was once a speck of stardust too.
I know my bones are as old as you. I heard when a star dies streaking hot
white across the sky it’s not just a wish I make. It’s that dying star containing
dazzling dust, each particle hitching a ride on a raindrop made of our collective evaporations, falling back towards us, falling onto unexpected skin,
penetrating derma, entering blood vessels, entering our water systems, our
sources of food, these cyclical digestions of stardust, making us over and
over and over, again and again and again.
I’m a repetition of all that was and is us. I love licking your cool grit-skin
Stanage Edge, as if I’m licking myself, licking stardust, being licked by you,
being licked by stars. An inter-cosmic whole planetary kissingnessfest. We all
have lips and tongues made of stardust.
I know my bones are as old as you. And I know my bones are hurting. Joints
screech splintering pain across my ankles, feet, shoulders. I’ll be typing
about stardust and Seven Mothers with sugar-fuelled fingers arthriticcing
with every tak tak tak into a version of nature called a laptop made of cobalt,
tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold – minerals of conflict – made of the rape of
thousands of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A machine created by violence, violating my body and psyche too. Yet it
allows my mind to roam free across the keys making starshaped poems. The
pain of typing and the pain of working all of this out. How can this machine be
nature too? How can nature be so violated.
So violent. Am I violent too?
Dear Stanage Edge, I know my bones are as old as you because we both
ache and have been trodden upon. We, compressed layers of hidden strata.
This poem is a sample taken, peered at through a microscope – an unfound
element – incomprehensible to others who look through the lens. You love
the tread of my footsteps, feeling the stories of otherwheres in the souls of my feet, understanding the transmission, this otherwildly ecotone we co-
create.
I know my bones are as old as you and you feel the raindrops too. In a
borderless world, the world where you live where language of boundaries
don’t exist, you speak the language of ancient sea creatures, glaciers,
compression and pressure, millstone grit, folds, tears and cracks directly into
my heart.
You tell me how raindrops fall painful now, stardust mixing with white
phosphorus and bomb smoke and repeated evaporations of griefings so
loud, so visceral, so astonishing in their purity of horror and loss and the
question that becomes air – if I don’t belong on this earth where do I
belong? if I don’t belong on this earth where do I belong?
Where can I belong?
And then I know my bones are burning from the inside out. Burning
awakening. Burning rage. Burning revolution. Burning grief. Burning guilt for
the freedoms I have. For all the freedom I have to witness childrens’ legs
blasted to the wrong direction held by a thread called vein and eyes that
don’t have language for what this feels like.
Eyes that don’t have language for what this feels like.
The freedom to tak tak tak these words into real. Repeated freedoms of
walking across Stanage Edge. I’m feeling acid in my bones. Those raindrops
containing all the everyones and everythings and everywheres and
everywhens – falling on me too.
And I know that my bones are all of this and all of you and one day I know I’ll
be that dying star falling onto this earth again and again over and over and
one day, I know, I’ll be all of YOU and you’ll be all of me and one day we’ll
all be each other.
Love that I get to hear you read this again 🙏🏽💜