It’s a cool fall evening in mid October.
I am alone on the campus of a small midwestern college.
Why am I here? This is the central question.
There are some students on the green.
One is playing a guitar, acoustic, slightly amplified.
It’s just loud enough to urge the students to release their youthful energy.
They talk and laugh over the volume of this half song or that.
I am a Black Man. Here in the lily-white suburban sprawl of the silicon prairie.
Far from the pain of my people,
I am so removed from my ancestors in space and time,
that I can barely feel myself a part of the world at all.
Why am I here? A good and hearty question that is,
full of tasty tidbits that linger in the mind
long after the urgency of life demands my attention on the morrow.
There is so much that I want to share.
Somehow, the opportunity just never seems to present itself,
or perhaps I’m never in the “right place” at the “right time”.
Sun in Pieces, Moon in Leo, maybe I’m just not ready.
I read somewhere that this is a most difficult aspect to choose for a lifetime.
Ah, now I see, the gathering is a bunch of so-called Christians.
Where’s a good Lion’s Den when you need one?
They are singing songs of praise to a God,
but what God are they singing to?
Are they singing to the God that commanded them to rape and pillage my forefathers?
Are they singing to the God that rips the souls from indigenous cultures?
Or are they singing to the God that I have been searching for,
the God that I have called out to in pain and sadness in the darkest moments of my life?
Are they calling out to the Deity that I found standing by my bedside one night?
Have they felt the presence of spirit flowing through all things?
Have they had the tantalizing glimpse into the garden… from the outside?
Have they felt the sting of the angelic sword, the flames of which bar us forever?
I want to go home! I want home to be here now!
I feel paradise just beyond the reach of my psyche
like a forgotten thought on the tip of my tong,
like a word I write over and over, but never seem to be able to spell.