The Alchemy of Rice (for Nina’s great-great-grandmother)
Did you love him, grandmother?
South Carolina border crosser
pokeweed puller
marryer of slaves
baby producer
corn grower, maize pounder
magician Indian woman savior
Catawba or Aniyunwiya, Tsalagi, Cherokee.
Who kissed you across the border?
Tricked you into marrying
a man dark as the moon’s quiet eyes
a West African rice master
good laugher
big silver mud man with Middle Passage hands
with cool sweet milk and rice breath
who, without his moist African feet
no rice kernel
would have risen from the swamp waters
and landed
in any sardonic white mouth.
Or was it by the wheat broom’s choice?
Who blew you both open
great-great-grandmother and grandfather
with breath over palm kiss?
Good sense tickled
from the red earth’s throat
and said
you and you
and you have to go first.
It’s not Eunice’s time.
A Song of Threes (for Nina Simone)
Eunice carefully
watches and listens to the pearl sound
under the music.
Back firm, elbows up.
She fingers bones
until something else
happens.
White and black teeth sink into her.
Melodies thread her vertebra
like stars
imploding.
Cleaves to nostril hairs.
Deposits notes C, D, E, F, G
C, D, E, F, G
like a queen bee
delicately
prophetically
depositing calcified honey
into the hive of her young heart.
These two Nina Simone poems excerpted from
The Lost Songs of Nina Simone by
Shonda Buchanan, forthcoming May 2025.
For Ralph Yarl on Earth Day (And for my grandsons)
If we loved Black boys like the earth
If we loved Black boys like trees
If we loved their hair like parks
If we loved their smiles like oceans
If we loved their hands like desert flowers
If we loved their shoulders like rainbows
If we loved their intellect, their dancing, their good grades like mountains
If we loved them like geodesic rays of the sun
Like freshwater pearls and cotton clouds that move like ghosts across the Indian sky
If we loved them, loved them like favorite surf spots,
like the best benches to view the moon, an eclipse, a game
If we knew we needed their laughter like rainwater
If we knew we needed their tears like spring pollen and vibrating bees
If we held their cobalt, obsidian, tangerine, toffee, mocha,
licorice bodies as tenderly as a silk night
If we cherished them like fly fishing in cold streams,
like picking food in your lome-slicked gardens
If we loved them like sailing, like sports, like a magic trick you could never figure out
If we loved Black boys like the earth
We wouldn't shoot them
We wouldn't shoot them on a porch for knocking on the wrong door
We wouldn't pull them over on lonely streets
with tragic intent
We wouldn't stalk them on bikes, in open spaces, in classrooms, in boardrooms, at liquor stores
If we loved them, death wouldn't haunt their James Baldwin dreams
We wouldn't fold them like squares in a box that we prayed over with every breath in our body.
If we loved Black boys like we love the earth
Wrapped our whole bodies around them like an atmosphere
If we coveted them like the sun, the moon, the stars we kissed under in nascent love
If, if, if we loved them
we could see them.
If we can see them
we can save them.
Black boys would be heirloom seeds we waited our entire lifetimes to find
and we could plant, re-seed the earth
with their music.
Watch them grow up.
If we loved Black boys like the earth
They. Would. Know. It.
Excerpt from my unpublished chapbook, America’s Bloodflowers, a Black Lives Matter collection.
