Soul

I saw you this afternoon in the "E" train to World Trade Center, dressed in proudly african black. I couldn't resist looking to your fleshy bright lips. I dreamt about eat them as a kid wants a marshmallow sweet. The destiny emptied the seat by your side. Dissimulating the desire I sat next to you and our arms were rubbing each other with the movement of the train. You get off in Penn Station, but I stayed with you.

I saw you yesterday morning at the University. I thought you were in London but your big smile calmed me down. Prettier than ever, you talked to me but I didn't listen to you. Your dark breasts filled your white sleeveless with an ancestral presence, so powerful and contrasting that just remembering the ritual could be enough to get rain falling over the hot Union Square, and a T-Storm ray shocking me. Please come back.

I talked to you last week by the phone. Your girlish voice made me laugh. Your adult thoughts made me cry. I imagined your brown ass buttered and your neck with a sugar path to follow with my tongue until your ears. Please repeat it. It's not to understand you, but to enjoy you again. I want you to calling me again even when I know that the next weekend I will not see you either. Even if I never met you I feel that you are mine.

I observed to you last month in the Harlem streets. Walking with your kids, going to the sacred hairdresser late in the night, doing the laundry, screaming to a neighbor from balcony to balcony. Your voice sounded similar to my father's goddess Ella. Your meat moved as dancing, your giant globes could feed the world. I want to apprehend them and be flooded with chocolate, while you sing in my ears like my super model Aretha.

I watched your picture last year. It was a raw witness about one of the most bloody and shameful episodes of the humanity. You, Delia the American-born slave, seemed to have lost your soul. Your pointed nipples had been made to be delightfully sucked, but savages treating you as a savage extracted their main attraction. Nevertheless your generation survived in Georgia and Carolina, like my survivors in Egypt and Auschwitz. Your lost soul stayed in the air during all these years to reappear in Harlem, my phone, the University and the "E" train. And I desire them as I desire you, Delia...

...because you were not a free woman, but maybe now you have a free soul.


Notes:

"Africaine épanouie", painted in 1996 by Augustin Kassi, Bouake, Côte d'Ivoire.

An image of Delia can be seen in the following link at Harvard College:
http://preserve.harvard.edu/exhibits/daguerreotype/page10.html