The Weekly Pause (Humanity United)

grass[1] woven[2] into[3] language[4]

[1] woven into a mosquito’s nest for babies our grandmother told us mosquitoes have nests i should have thought to ask but i never questioned the fact from our grandmothers fingers twisting knowledge plaiting strands of grasses now you try she told each of us   & these days i still remember what kinds of grasses can make nests that need to be woven tightly because they taught us in school that mosquitoes sucked at our blood anopheles mosquitoes female mosquitoes never thinking we needed to hold on to our girl blood too because female anopheles mosquitoes needed ours to grow their babies so our grandmother taught us how to make nests & these days I hold strands of grasses in my fingers which have a thin memory of how to fold them   i still know to pick the cylindrical ones the ones with feathered tops that we cut off because they were not part of the nests but my brain holds on to my grandmother’s voice between languages & the texts that we read in school from which we learned to spell nest & nets so how was i to hear different because i still never read anywhere that acholi made mosquitoes nets to stop the mosquitoes from biting our babies & my fingers still don’t remember & books still don’t know
[2] baskets
[3] knowledge for those who don’t live between languages
[4] which then holds on to us     my fingers race through the keyboard but can’t remember the pattern of my grandmother’s mosquito nets

Video credit: Humanity United with thanks.