Becoming Ebony

When I Rise to Look the Sunshine in Its Bare Eye

56 When I Rise to Look the Sunshine in Its Bare Eye Today settles at dawn, taking over my collar bones, moving down my upper back, my spine, back and forth, the pain travels. Molecules of migraine tighten muscles to make room for the afternoon sunshine, a waiting place as the day passes by. The plans of today become like mountains gathering store upon my head. Bed covers huddle or I huddle against bed covers, but my husband may never know how memory eats away the day while I still lie in bed. I have no reason though, to fear the day. A single day has never before conquered me; not even when bombs fell at my back yard. When I rise to look the sunshine in its bare eye, my mind travels from here to Liberia, where war has snapped away the years from us all. The BBC news says that my old neighborhood is now a Beverly Hills in Monrovia, in a now bleak country. Charles Taylor has taken over Congo Town with his rebels, our Warrior Master as though he were the British Crown partitioning Africa at the dinner table, handing out a huge continent in small rations. Charles Taylor has settled in, now all the women are concubines. All the girls are become mistresses before puberty. Where are the men? You will find them walking the streets, seeking work. Someone told them war is over. The men are become concubines. All of us are now concubines of war. I sit here in Kalamazoo, the snow falls in small flakes, the ground turns from green grass to white. My new life is becoming a sofa that will not let me 57 recall how I fled from home from the war. Now all the years have become for me a longing to go back home, a waiting to return, to slip back home and see what the country I still love has become. ...