Praise Song for Akinsanya / Praise Song for My Mother

to the brothers returning home from zones drenched with bouncing Bettys
& for every black child untouched unscathed unharmed unmolded . . .

Praise your wonder in long necks bejeweled like emerald beetles
Inlaid copper coils that reach ancestors below hanging blankets
Praise the vipers’ keen void of redaction & exultation for Damballah.
Praise moss atop crocodiles of the Nile beneath lotus flowers.

Praise the rice fields, the sawdust, the heat-stroked jungles that cushion
your worries; the Sacramento leaves foraged & crackling in water scald,
always diamonds for your kindred. Praise your hands that shape violin strings,
made living in dank birthing rooms - sweet like pulp from rapeseed terraces -
your life the porridge of buckwheat blossoms prayers for your guardians.

Praise flickers, your breath. Praise your 1461 smuggled into index.
Praise Maasai markings meander through the bones of your raku orchids.
Praise the Olmec gods’ lavender monsoon your Dahomeyan messengers.
Praise these dismantled barracoons starved of oxygen reawakening ancestors.

Praise you clairvoyant imbalanced eyes that satellite the canopies
Praise your invocation of terrific avian vessels adrift with freedom dreams.

Praise the dimmed now ignited mosquitos oracles indigenous
the earth you translate in griot fellowship with gang members.
Praise the armpits granted mercy from jungle rot leech missiles.

Praise your Zanzibar reliefs & Haitian prophesies.

Praise your kilns that rotate Mars toward Great Grand Mama Tanyhill
that suture the cosmos like Ọsanyin that cast horns from fire & honey
all botany into libretto bisque. Sonic chrysanthemums marigold afros
buffalo tentacles locked in silver & unpredictable.
Praise the cannon fodder you empower in fevered visions.

You Avenger, galactic peach blossom hatchling naked & screeching,
flightless manchild astride a marbled stallion with double axe.
Praise to the Bisimbi in your line enchanted armored checkered
Praise your nana’s juju, impervious to punji bamboo. Praise the soul
sessions & codex made coloring book. Praise glyphs for every
soul brother from other mothers, every Ace of Spades, every Boonie
every guerilla. Praise the heart never spent on death only prayer pots
that Aganyu’s temperance & Ogun’s toolshed burrowed
into every green helmet you made a bouquet of hydrangeas.

Praise for the earth, clay, Texan bonnets of cobalt & carbon
those celestial tremors & synthesized chains & candle wicker.
Praise the mudfish the horned Sankofa the Black-eyed Susans &
rites of Sacramento. Praise chameleon primrose queened breasts as broad

as tortoise shells. Praise your hands never wearied by informants,
that made railroad & time traveled inside shrines the seen & unseen souls.

Praise song for Spades sweet drag of strong cigars & stoic beer.
Praise the compass & shrapnel carried home to find your heaven.
Praise you, the forgiven cause you stayed freed.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs was born and raised in New York City. She is an interdisciplinary poet, sound artist, and author of In Search of Sugarcane, TwERK, and Village, among other titles, as well as an independent curator, artistic director, and producer. Diggs’s work is truly hybrid. Languages and modes are grafted together and furl out insistently from each bound splice. Diggs has received a United States Artists Fellowship (2026), a Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize (2025) , a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship (2015), a Whiting Award (2016), and a C.D. Wright Award for Poetry from the Foundation of Contemporary Art (2020), in addition to grants and fellowships from Cave Canem, Creative Capital, Howard Foundation, and the Japan–United States Friendship Commission. Diggs lives in East Harlem.