Linda M. Deane is a British-Barbadian writer, editor and storyteller. She is co-founder, with Robert Edison Sandiford, of the publishing and cultural entity ArtsEtc. Her writing for children and adults has earned her multiple Frank Collymore Literary Endowment awards and a Governor General’s Award of Excellence in Literary Arts. Linda is a writing and learning guide known as The Summer Storyteller. Her most recent work can be found at Preelit.com, acalabash.com, therockretreat.com, and artsetcbarbados.com, and her debut poetry collection, Cutting Road Blues: A Narrative, is to be published later this year.
Linda M. Deane
Give me back my maiden name
and words for wonders that were mine:
bearded fig, sacred silk, forest, chalky mount and gully.
Let mine ancient baobab be, seed spanning
a sky of sea. Give me back mine own,
What? How?
Did they tick the box marked “Home” for “lay me
beneath blue sky on forever overcrowded rock”?
Or did they tick the one marked “Away” for
“bury me where any old sky finds me”?
To a Palestinian Poet Who Berates
To you, a Palestinian poet who berates,
I try to walk a mile in your poems,
to read the world in your shoes, feel
your fear as though transplanted
from the shifting soil that is Barbados
into your own strip of turmoil,
oceans away.
Sock Anxiety
But looka this thing for me, though. This child
born and named for daybreak. This lithe wire
testing her spark but wanting, still, at 17
to nuzzle her mother’s neck, be up onderneat’
Still There
Something else is new! For the very first time, we are introducing original musical compositions as part of the magazine's content. Readers will be entertained in this issue by a jazzy piece entitled 'Still There' its lyrics by Linda M. Deane, a regular contributor to BIM. Deane Days Music is the producer.
“Still There”
Copyright: Deane Days Music
Lyrics: Linda M. Deane
Composer & arranger: Susan Deane Beckles
Vocals: Casheda Dottin
All instruments & background vocals: Susan Deane Beckles
Calculus
He grew the biggest pears in Buhbayduss. Full-bodied
affairs that everyone kept watch on
Meeting Point
(A Bridgetown poem)