New Poetry gifted to me in Ghana

If you follow me on Instagram (@lindakaoma), then you know I was in Ghana on a self-organised and self-funded artistic residency for the month of April. One of the main reasons I went there was to carve out time to be able to write, and complete the first draft of my manuscript for my upcoming poetry collection. More on my trip to Ghana in the next blogpost, for this post I wanted to share an excerpt of a poem that was gifted to me while I was there. And I say gifted, because it felt like I had very little to do with it except write it. It is a hard feeling to try explain; the only reference I can think of is from the movie the Matrix when Neo can "download" any skill/ability he wants. The poetry feels like it is "downloaded" from somewhere in the ether and my role is to transcribe it. This type of poetry writing/gifting hardly happens to me, but when it does it feels like magic and I am so grateful that Ghana saw me fit for such magic.

The poem below is called Soul mates, and I wrote it in celebration of my beautiful tribe of sisters, and to reclaim the word from it being constantly associated with a romantic partner. I honestly feel like the tribe of women I have in my life are a huge blessing and I can say that I know true love because of them, and a lot of the qualities and experiences I once thought I could only get from a romantic partner I get from them. And how wonderful is it to free my romantic partner of the expectation to be THE ONE AND ONLY soul mate? I wish I could go back in time to my loner younger self and tell her all the ways of being ostracized will mean nothing in a few years. Thanks tribe for making me and my inner child hella happy. Anyway, enough with the explanations, don't you just hate it when people over explain their work? See excerpt below.

Soulmates

I have a soul mate who cries whenever she sees me

I remind her of her sister, you see

each encounter is doused with absence

but after the tears dry we pass around stories and memories

and we make a feast of the past

I have a soul mate I’ve been loving since we were 16

we carry each other’s hearts on pendants

and have matching mandalas of secrets tattooed on our skin

when we meet we stretch our laughing lines as far as they can go

we will always find our way to each other

I have a soul mate whose inner child is besties with my inner child

whenever we are together we have an urgent brightness in our eyes

we lean into each other and giggle at ourselves and the world

we refuse to be nothing but ourselves with each other

often we pass on a baton filled with tears back and forth

I have a soul mate who says I love you in hushed tones

but her love is the loudest in so many ways

she celebrates me and everything I do in radiant words

we wear our sexuality stylishly around each other

and chats about sex sit comfortably in our mouths

These are just a few of the women I love dearly