Braids

A poem

There’s braids in your skin
An infinity of infinitesimal twisted overlapping plaits
Amino chains with telomere caps
That appear in their cinnabar hues when your pricked finger bleeds
In the rich pigment of your rosebud lips
The crystalline blue of your eyes
Or is it a rich ocher, a somber bister, a velvety ecru
Perhaps the rare hazel you’re born with?

There’s the vermillion melanin of your ephelides
Made by your ancestors’ exposure to the sun
A trace, perhaps, of their tramp from warmer climes
Where their tint spoke to the dimming light
Under dusky skies
With the colder weather of the north

Your braids tell tales
Shaping you, by breadth and height, a story of the stoutness of your stock
Along the lines of your lineage and the path they took to you
Of your eyelids, and fingernails
Where they teem, even as they’re cast off
The follicles, of head and eye, similarly shed
The shape of your skull and jaw
The length of fingers and toes
Buried in enamel coating the teeth in your maw
There’s braids in your braids, even when you go bald