Dedicated to the service men, foundry men, labourers, farm hands, nurses: those Windrush generation giants.
1948 (i)
them big small-island people
congregating like hope
on a Sunday morning
them same one
bigger than any one story
is who I am:
a child born of them who
keep their mouth in quiet protest
their riot to one side,
their commitment to dignity, lifelong.—
even when hate stands up in an
english man like possession,
they walk in strides two generations wide
bigger than the Orishas when I see them.
a tribe. not quite Arawak or Ashanti
but far too mulatoed
to be a native of any one place.
now each uprooted colossus
in khaki, calico soft, gabardine—
puts roots down here
and walks like trees.
1958 (ii)
ten years since Windrush
and even Pakistanis turn Black, their
neighbours under the Raj turn Black,
they can see the Colour Bar exists:
a line cut across the nation, a thing
of white imagination
that black Britishers have been
limbo dancing ever since
John Blanke*, since Seacole.
We settlers never did settle good in
some people’s stomach.
is why a people’s ambition can turn
a teddy boy on a church sister, a black
family bedsit to kindle
for petrol bomb fire?
so them pulpit calypsonians,
swaying like Lord Kitchener
with a douse of Holy Spirit
preach hot coals of love
on the heads of idle white boys
singing about nigger hunting, with
sticks, knives, iron bars in accompaniment.
or second generation activists
who looked into the mirror of the Atlantic
seeing Montgomery, Alabama reflected
on British shores. The lilt of Malcolm
and Martin was heard in the call for the local
boycott of Bristol Omnibus Company,
in the fight against slum landlords who reduced
our existence to slumdogs.
1963 (iii)
72’ and a flash of dreadlocks
a weeping prophet is cut from the hilly part
of Jamaica, like a flame
fireman goes out in the eighties
and the riffs of his scriptures still play
on the conscience of the radio.
Jimmy Cliff hymns the harder they come,
in a shifting, changing backdrop,
a Windrush, a Pentecost in the Motherland,
a rushing wind blowing over Eldorado,
an unfurling clove of hope
that sits atop the heads
of those who held close the hymn book,
the leather bound KJV.
I look at you as a child—
the roll of your walk, the broad of your shoulders
the sweet brawl of your talk.
If you can bless me with anything
give me the power to name,
to call out things that are not,
as though they were—
if that which sustained you
sustains me, I will be as you are,
not as giants, but as men
walking as men.