Craft as Crossing

After Noor Hindi

It doesn’t matter whether English forms

like sonnets penned by missionaries leech

into the robes and drums and cross my fore

fathers filtered through their own; soon they teach

Victorian proselytizers’ boxes of hate

as if that cross will emboss our shore against the maw

of the Atlantic we’ve fed carbon dioxide,

as if the hawks across the shallows won’t hem and haw

at the audacity of us fleeing

for dry land. It doesn’t matter whether the French

villanelle would swell, a natural spiral

to gyre with the cyclone the hawks bring

all the way home. It doesn’t matter when

My youngest brother is a phrase I use

only within certain ports. It doesn’t

matter when they 

crave to cross 

us all

out.