Crossing
I begin by stripping my life of comforts. One cotton shift,
no shoes. Sleep on the dirt floor, eat black bread and water.
Sunrise I go to the clearing to focus on prayer.
A knotted cord around my head to signify.
Chores yes, but no break from praying. I do what Ma says
and come straight back. My cord tells them No talking to this one.
Alone in the wild with the Spirit and the Book. I dream
images of God and the ones who lead me toward Him.
My bare feet, my cotton shift, my bread. I find a rough pine-
branch to talk to. My echoes singing the book, the light.
My guide, Be revealed to me. I am alone but not alone.
See me along my journey. See into my dreams.
My child, do you not river with? So fiery and waving, so time.
Where we envoy some people, how seven-thing.
So speaks my guide, and I understand.
Heron track, still buck speak too. Rough stick, black water.
I do not cross until I have my name. When the bright image.
Who will know me when I have been given the dream?
I was a girl. I am not a girl. I do not know what I am.
I go into the river. The song, the book, the light.
© 2008 Katherine Williams
This is an ekphrastic poem, based on Jonathan Green’s painting of his experience of the Gullah-Geechee ritual of passage into adulthood they call Seeking. It was an honor to be invited to submit, but I could not imagine how to approach so important a Gullah-Geechee tradition. I found two transcribed oral accounts of the experience, and fused and shaped the texts to evoke the universal experience of spiritual transformation. I truly regret not being able to find my online sources.
The author gratefully acknowledges publication of “Crossing” in Seeking: Poets Respond to Jonathan Green, Kwame Dawes and Marjory Wentworth, Eds. University of South Carolina Press (2013)
