Exploring the Mystical Power of Friendship

Is it Serendipity? Fate? Or the inevitable colliding of time? What creates that mystical essence of kinship between folk who though meeting for the first time, experience a sense of familiarity, of connection that can only be engendered through the passage of time?  This poem, Visiting the Village is a reminiscence of the profound ties established between friends who though meeting for the first time, experience a bond that suggests genealogical connections way beyond the coming together in that moment in linear time.

Visiting the Village

Maakye, bon jour, hola, how de do?

Many accents, many voices,

Our native tongues intermingled

Into the voice of the familiar

And we felt no need for a translator,

Bonded by the commonality

Of our experiences,

Our lineage forged in the bloodstream

Of our collective memory.

Race, history, gender and family merged

Into this village;

A tribe of native voices,

On this far corner of the Earth:

Ghana, Libya, Grenada, Trinidad, St. Lucia and Jamaica.

Our ancestral memories defined us,

Shaped us and called us to this place;

A gathering of sisters, paseros,

A neighborhood of friends;

Village folk dropping by for an afternoon visit.

We took it upon ourselves to dream,

To claim a place in the universe;

The far corners of the Earth.

We traced the footsteps of the past

And peered the clouds of the future, and

We agreed that the best is yet to come.

..from Bridges to Memory: Poems by Marva McClean 2007