Poetry Month 2023 Poem-A-Day Post #28: “Repenting”

April is #NationalPoetryMonth and I am posting a Poem-A-Day. Yesterday I spent pretty much the entire day with people with whom I am in community who are doing the intentional, internal, and collective work of dismantling the pathologies and patterns of white culture. I wrote this poem last year around this time. This dance with repentance, reckoning, and transforming continues.

Repenting

Startled repentance
Fed my soul
Turning, rolling
Churning, boiling

That word holds
Pregnant call
Prescient pause
You are not what you should be.

Burning, troubling
Purposeful learning
Growing, knowing
the world needs to change

Repentance is turning
around who I am
Becoming less
Achievement more bereavement

For what will never be
Nestled within
That dis-ease
That dysmorphic
Gaze is me

Staring back
at a person
Creator dreamed up
I am a fabricated
Aspiration

A night time
Desire for another
Look at what can be
Who will see her
Emerging into another