Rice and other small miracles

The gentle turning of my father's hand mixing

water and rice in a steel-bottomed pot.

This is a meditation,

an ode,

a rumination,

a miracle of some small kind.

The pot is nothing;

everything.

Two dollars from the Sally Ann

for innumerable jollofs,

fufus,

peanut butter soups,

light soups,

kenkes.

A good deal.

The white grains swim carefree

in the water, inverted freckles floating

starkly against the rich, dark brown

of his smooth hands.

His skin is not like mine.

Mine is a middling chestnut,

speckled like a chicken's,

but I know that I am

his. Not because my eyes slant

up to greet the sky

in the same way as

his, or because my nose bends

toward the ground

in a gentle arc that parallels

his own.

I know

because of the fears he reveals

to me, sometimes. Lately, often.

Of the smallness

of his life.

Of the BIGNESS

of his dreams—

potential.

What could have been.

Might have been,

if he had been more _____.

If _____ had not happened.

How he wished he could do _____ for me.

These confessions take me

by surprise. And not.

I am greedy for them

in the way that children always hunger

to know the secrets that betray

their parents to be real people.

They also scare

me because they are familiar.

That and they are too much

for me to fix.

For him.

For me.

He finishes rinsing

the rice (sometimes rice;

other times, black-eyes peas

for red-red, when I will be allowed

to pilfer fried plantains

from the sizzling pan before lunch).

My place is on the other side

of the counter, peppering him

with a child's smalltalk

even though, as the years go by,

I slide into middle age.

"Daddy," I say,

time after time,

telling him what I want to eat,

eyeing the deeply etched lifelines,

earthy like roots,

steady, branching

across his sand-coloured palms,

as he obliges

me.

There is a special ventricle,

I am convinced,

in the hearts of children born to

immigrant parents.

Activated by the scents and flavours

of foods from countries where we were

never born, the ventricle pumps

something of home

into our motherland-

or fatherland-starved blood.

My father measures the water;

two finger-widths above

the freshly purified rice.

It is precisely

inexact. It is fluffy

every time.

He turns back to me, grinning,

quoting King Lear, singing

Fela in giddy falsetto, dicing

and mincing tomatoes and onions.

Adding far too much salt.

I worry

about his heart. I worry

about his liver. I worry

about his happiness. I worry—

It is a physical worry, nesting

in the pit of my growling

stomach. He hears it,

I know, and he cooks

to fill it. And to give

what he can give. We make

it enough.

The gently boiling water,

starchy grains frothing

under the wobbling

two-dollar steel lid,

love.