In answer to your Battle Lines: AMFT to CPF

© Camila Pacheco-Fores, A Self Portrait 

By Ana M. Fores Tamayo

As I read your battle lines, I am consumed
by the loveliness of rhythm, sound, lyric,
forgetting that words speak sorrow, introspection and sometime hurt.


How can I trace the browns and whites of those ancestries,
the contour of your days and times of long ago,
when you played as a child with other golliwogs and ragdolls,
laughing crying smiling growling,
yet inside all this time you were thinking about those battle lines inside you,
that deep brown cicatrix,
that darkness, that difference, that oddness that made you so you,
that made you so lovely?


Yet you did not see that,
you just stared at those deep tan lines that sheltered your musky secret…


So I wonder now why I did not tell you.


I had my secret tan lines too,
my trouble with language with homeland
With people not accepting that I was thinking something inside me

 but I was saying something other,
that I was smiling bemused, beaming happy-go-lucky,
yet I was black inside, hidden: forbidden?
My sister Lupi always told me I was darkness.
She hated my poetry.
She loved its sway, its nuance.
So.
She loathed it mostly because she said it was someone other
who wrote those words.
It was not the laughing me,
the me of the mischievous senses,
the telling marauder of tales,
the intoxicating dark entrancing eyes
wrapping entwined seductions of love songs,
but a dark somber other she did not know.
And I scared her.


I grasped that my terminologies had such effect on people,
My meanings caused loved ones so much pain.
Hence I blocked even my most intimates from seeing my illusive missives,
my scrambled considerations,
and I wore my meditations on the inside, much like your tan lines
that faded deep down into the reaches of your white.


Time passed on and I kept writing,
yet it became secretive, taboo,
a blackness not meant for common girls,
not destined for thinking girls,
not intended for girls who wanted day-to-day fineries and wine.
Eventually I forced myself
—consciously and conspicuously— not to write.

At first it was hard.
It pained me when I would wake in the middle of the night
and I would scramble for that pen and paper
and scratch in darkness words that poured out of me without thought,
but then I would stop myself and say no, I cannot.
And as I would
halt,
and time wore on and on,
it became easier,
just like your tan lines that faded
and you thought your “brown pushed deep within”. 

Life went on and took on other meanings.
Literary musings gave way to baby bottles and scraped knees.
Those gave way to soccer games and coaches,
bassoon concerts and choir recitals,
all things teens and growing children do.
Thus I forgot all about my tan lines.
And my musings…
Until I read your own.


So now I look back and read with loveliness
and dreams about your tan lines,
and I feel that though they will never leave you—
as they never quite left me—
they might become faded for some time.
They might show the “boundaries of battle played out,”
they might even show “where the sun has never lingered,”
but they will come back,
inescapably, unavoidably, undeniably
one day.


They will return because they’ve never left.
And they will embrace you,
loveliness and deep,
because these tan lines are always there,
always haunting.


These tan lines are permanent reminders
that we are not dark, but we are deep,
and we are, always, truly meaningful. 

Girls at Beach, by Dinorah Fores