Black women keep secrets tied up in hankies

they stuff in their bras, secrets of how their necks

are connected to their spines in the precise gyration

of a jelly sweetened in nights they had to keep

to themselves, nights prowlers came in to change

the faces of their children, secrets like the good

googa mooga laughter they do with each other

when something affirms their suspicions, when

their eyes are made the prayerbooks of fate crafted

in the wisdom that knows there is no north or south

in black wandering, searching the new land, a song

they wrestle from black men, the broken ones

who had to be shown where and how to stand,

how to respect pain and the way it governs itself,

secrets, things made out of generations and not kept

in the glass selections of an old juke box.