“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” 
                                                                                Chinua Achebe


A rite of passage. In my family, when a girl is born, she is gifted
a shovel. Generations of gravediggers slicing through the ground 
like an autopsy,		exposed roots, tiny pebbles glinting 
like my mother’s eyes after weeping. They buried all they did not want 
to see: each bad thought, every skull and all their secrets
sentenced to shallow graves beneath the bedrock,
where my ancestors’ bones ache for sunlight, where their stories
died in their jawbones, where soft moss muzzles a photograph 
of my brother. We set no altars, burned no incense, 
told ourselves they were safer beneath their headstones.
Who knew they would resent their improper burial —- 
wail and rise again? Bad daughter, buried by guilt,
left to silence the ghosts I’ve inherited. I did what I was taught. 
I stuffed their mouths with dirt clods. How cruel, 
how thoughtless of me, to gather earth without thanking it.
Bad daughter, unable to hear her mother tongue
through the mindless mud and rock. 	
I looked up to no moon orbiting over me: left to unbury
myself, to exhume answers from their tombs,
root out questions from this noiseless graveyard, where
my family tree hovers like a specter, shadow eternally extending
over me, little girl: excavating burial ground
with a flick of her pen. Bad daughter: unearthing 
the bones of my foremothers, holding seance with their spirits, 
writing their stories in a language they cannot read. 
Silence	 the heaviest thing I’ve inherited, 
Yet my pen is	 a shovel, 	I swear, 
they will live again in ink, 	in my words, 
in this American soil, where seeds sprout from their bones, 
and the wildflowers will sing their stories.