Ubuntu II

Lyrics

I hold the photograph.The paper is thin, tired.A woman I have never met, but her eyes…Her eyes know my name.And this cold feeling, it is not the draft from the window.My hands flinch when you reach for the sugar.A small, tight knot behind my own ribs.It is not my fear. I have lived a safe life.Bessel van der Kolk said the body keeps the score.But this is not my game. This is not my tally.It is an accent on the tongue of my nerves, a story told in muscle fiber, a language I was born already knowing how to forget.This is Ubuntu’s shadow.The other side of "I am because we are."It is the mirror neuron in my skull firing for a ghost.Reflecting a hand that is not there, a pain from a time before my time.This is the shared wound.This is the echo in the blood.In Parma, Italy, 1992.A monkey watches a man eat an ice cream cone.And a wire in its brain sings the same song of reaching.An accident, this discovery.That we are built to echo.But what of the echoes from a Kigali church? From a boxcar?What does the neuron do with a scream passed down like a silver locket?This is Ubuntu’s shadow.The other side of "I am because we are."It is the mirror neuron in my skull firing for a ghost.Reflecting a hand that is not there, a pain from a time before my time.This is the shared wound.This is the echo in the blood.Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart calls it unresolved.A grief that lives in the attic, in a shoebox of faded faces.It is not a story I can close.It is in the way I check the locks twice.The way I hold my breath in crowds.The body keeps the score, and this is the inheritance.This is the debt.The woman in the photograph.I see it now.The echo.In her eyes. In mine.This, too, is how we are.