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Moonlight whispers of war.
Slashed backs sheath plans of ambush
leaves drop on secret strategy covered by bamboo and courage.
The brothers have assembled.
Dawn will roar fire and spear
of knives and grass
Long, lazy lunches
months and years of moments and memories
rising with the steam from curry chicken
and white rice and “food”
since yuh never fly back fi eat nutten but boil dumplin and yam.
Ever notice how, on any given street in Europe
you’ll always find fat pigeons?
These vagrants
roadside, power-line squatters
always seem to be well fed
and hobble, mockingly ignorant
with round, taut bellies dragging on the ground.
December 3rd, 1794
Portuguese ship leaving the coast of Mozambique
7,000-mile voyage to Maranhão, Brazil.
Names, faces, jobs, talents, goals, skills, ideas, hobbies, friends, families, hopes, dreams
...now slaves
loaded like cattle and sold like chattel
Can we go back?
To before history was written with white hands
on white pages
telling white lies about our worth?
Can we go back?
To when history was written with black hands
in black ink
for colonisers so loved their colonies
they painted churches white
and their heavens
erected poles for us to dream
of flags, not lands
carved hills for forts
named and renamed forts after battle victors
make this the last
colonial governor’s fixity
in place
last of its kind
from the country
that dug holes
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
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”?
What were they thinking when they signed here.
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.
“…he should approach the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father…”
I idly turned on the TV
And saw them taking horses
To the starting gate.
A mare refused to go in:
You can take a horse to the racing track,
But you cannot make her run.
The announcer was getting impatient;
Through the car window,
A towering black cross
Threatened us.
A predecessor
Of gallows, electric chairs and lethal injections,
It was once an instrument of imperial power.
It now proclaimed the price its famous victim paid
A loved errand
was, on some evenings,
taking portions of my mother’s dinners,
in a white carrier,
to my grandmother and my aunt;
and after enjoying offerings of their dinners,
—now a total of three under my belt—
I joined the carolling in the museum,
And sang with my hosts
As we sat on the carpeted floor
Under the giant totem poles.
I wondered what dialogue there could be
Between these songs, mostly from Europe,
A Short Story from the Archives:
Vol. 10, No. 38, Pages 78-88 (January–June 1964)
For dinner with the wolf I wear the green dress, the one that sparkles. Our waiter’s fingers wobble as he scribbles—2 rib-eye steaks, rare. The wolf orders for me, confident I share his love of bleeding meat, and smiles without thought to his incisors.
A man’s hand came through the wall behind our bed, made a web of cracks around it and shuddered a minute before it was still, bruises starting to set on the fingers. It was a left hand, with slightly curved fingers hanging loose and limp.
Winter, and it’s three a.m. in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Late January. Icicles hang from the apartment’s eaves. He shivers, his teeth clicking faintly, reminding him of when he was a child on a beach and came out of the water, shivering in the rain.