Sweet Samba
Bellies touch in a full orbit,
a navel and hip belt a Congo sphere
a corner circle a Kikongo Semba, masemba
from coast to coast and we move like two eager
ocean waves lapping at each other conjuring up our
old and new from Soyo to Bahia and ours is not for the
ballroom but we are on a discus dancing in the kitchen far
away from one&two&three&four. Ours is a circular rhythm,
hoodoo measure, a Candomblé sound that has already been
to the four moments of the sun, where centers kiss & touch.
We have made our love here, and I have made you cry and
moan and sweet, sweet polyrhythmic hands and mouths
and hips all moving, you have made me sing in this
cycle, pressing away, precise and flowing sweet
so sweet, if we could taste rhythms of honey
and sugar of cocoa beans and mango
and cane sweet samba, we have
made us here, sweet
samba
Shauna M. Morgan is a poet-scholar who teaches creative writing and Africana literature at the University of Kentucky. She has published poetry in A Gathering Together, ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Interviewing the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Her critical work has appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, South Atlantic Review, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and ariel: A Review of International English Literature, among other periodicals. Shauna tends to a hopeful ancestral garden in the Artists’ Village where she lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
