Why can’t a K be beautiful and magick?
Why can’t a K be beautiful and magick? - Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Why can’t a K be beautiful and magick?
It exists in knots but nobody will say
how it appeared there, why, who snitched
and stitched it up, or when.
It makes the shark’s teeth cut as they do
when they slit enamel into bone easy
as plugs into coy sockets.
Does the K have a temper? Perhaps it should
because it sounds like a can’t. Switch the a to
a u and it sounds like washing your mouth out with
Listerine. This is a litany against the commonwealth
of anger displaced onto the K.
The K is not okay –
the K is the most misunderstood, ignored, indentured
letter of all. But K is a creature
unlike any else. Insouciance magical.
What and why and where did it never exist
until now? Until now. Till before, where when Kemetic,
Kush, Khan, Kryptos, Knight, Afrika, Amerikkka – hey bambaataa
you three Ks in a row that mean death. K where a C
used to be – watch me now – means a new life
existence evicted from exile into now
into the before-now,
don’t ask how yet, but,
home again.
Not all pretty words end in Cs and easy-Es. Not all
language is Romantic but all language is
loved and lived through so
don’t touch her hair
don’t say her name, it has a K in it
that don’t belong to you.
uncollected poem, first published on the Badilisha Poetry X-Change (The Africa Centre, 2015), © Victoria Adukwei Bulley 2015, used by permission of the author