I lace and relace my mother’s goulimine beads.
The ones that come from Morocco,
that she bought in the seventies.
The ones that my sister and I have argued over
since I was in my teens.
I watch the birds on the hawthorn tree in full bloom
from this new bedroom,
from this next place for me to
‘Rest’
or wrestle
with myself.
I watch myself cry
I ask the mouth in mirror and the eyes
do I love too much?
So much that I die at dawn as though racked by the stretch from sun to horizon
and ask that it all end,
before it begins again.
Yet often the string of those beads,
the Amazigh made,
(the Free People the Arab raiders renamed),
wears thin.
Nearly snaps.
And I string them all again,
although I know the other name these beads go by
is ‘slave.’
Sionnachaí 