Louise

Dedamet. I saw you, after the first flush of blooms.

I was picking through the ruins for my roots but you weren’t there.
Must I make an agreement with the living?

I cut the spike.
I surrendered to your dormancy.
Later, I cooed at the new growing from the old.
I kissed each bud as they swelled and broke, one at a time, to reveal the private ledger of your birth.

Without documentation. Without the truckloads of gravel between us, pinning our bodies in place.

When white flowers unfurled again, I stayed on the threshold of memory.
I didn’t have to give up anything. Not my pursuit of facts. Not my wildness.
I let the unexpected take shape: a mirror-image symmetry betraying your face.

What can I learn from your living? Your vagaries and blossoms?

I reach for you, madare madar bozorgam. Toward a past swallowed by stone. Unmapped yet in the earth. The orchid, my promise to care for that which animates us both. 

I promise to wrest you from the hands of those who would rewrite your life. No. No. I promise:

I promise touch. I promise my voice. I promise a willingness to dream.

I promise your face hewn into lost history.

Copyright © 2023 by Tala Khanmalek. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 27, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I wrote this poem while listening to an interview with Mohawk seed keeper Rowen White on the Finding Our Way podcast, hosted by Prentis Hemphill. At the time, I was learning how to grow orchids and, after months of careful attention, one of my plants finally rebloomed. The process of caring for orchids connected me to my maternal great-grandmother in a way that I had not felt before. White talks about seeds as a portal to our ancestry. For me, orchids opened up a living portal to Louise through which this poem emerged, with phrases borrowed from Patricia J. Williams’s 1988 essay ‘On Being the Object of Property.’ Although I had previously fixated on the familial and historical omissions that disconnected us across generations, I now experienced the many possibilities of tapping into our interbeing.”
—Tala Khanmalek