My Uncle Baba

Certainty, quietude, unearthly confidence
grounded not in a body or a mind
but in timelessness that continues.
A boisterous bellow.
We all share your laugh; a signature of sorts
an echo in those you leave behind.
My grandfather runs through your veins
as it does through my own and my son's.
Piercing eyes and a shock of white hair
set against rich, mahoghany skin.
A community Moses bridging troubled waters
to liberate and carry the shackled to the shores of freedom.

A diamond orator voice blending hues of light
in the crucible of your existence,
sourced from an ebony heart, pumped by an infinite
and almighty hand.
Smiles close the distance between
our of existences
your smile will be missed most.
Its fiery warmth a black ashen coal ready
to inflagrate and reduce us all to to the glorious
essence of our sacred and illumined core.

Let us each grieve in our own ways;
tears, fierce recommitement to action, surreal confusion,
a candle lit in a far away place, a stoic and soundless
perserverance, a prayer offered on a dark and beatuiful continent.
the shouts of children in quiet places.
All embraced.
Your important lesson; the myriad expressions of divinity
that come through us; evident even now in the grief that grips the room.
I will see you wherever soulfullness blossoms,
the shifting shapes of the candles flicker
the space between thoughts
the place where earth and sky eternally embrace.