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When Myrna laughed, the sound rumbled from deep inside her belly. People would pause at this other-worldly eruption.
My voice played musical chairs before leaving. It bounced apologies around the jogger who found me, the policeman, the nurse at the hospital – trying to find itself seated and steady when the music stopped. What it said was ‘sorry’.
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.
Fidel is dead; his year of birth is a rhyming
one—the year of Elizabeth II’s birth,
the year my father was born in Warri.
Who remembers the names of the women
perched between thighs to enact the ordinary
act of gathering the slippery bloody flesh?
You will remember that last meeting before her death.
That November Jamaica had lost its petulance. The season of sorrel,
rum and bloody poinsettias was gathering strength; and in that hiatus,
in a house buried by trees in the hills overlooking the sea,
You’re quiet today, Daddy,
none of your usual defenses
I could repeat word for word;
nor your lengthy sermons eclipsing
all my efforts at some kind
of closeness.
We’ve been travelling wordlessly
This room should be called “enough”
with its sound of arrival, its fixed white sheets
like a new beginning. I have left
my shoes at the door with their dust
of other things and places, I have hung
the drooping shoulders of my coat. I have paid
The man of your dreams has left the dream,
and left you so softly-stranded — he has risen
from the bed whose far corners you had stretched yourself
to, like a flat world whose ends you would go to with him,
each tucked corner of the sheet like a small commitment
For Louise
You left in your time
it is enough, you said, it is enough.
You let go, of the sucking-long-heave to breathe
of bones, muscles-loose in hanging skin heavy
too heavy to lift but light enough to fly away.
river water is clear so
stones flush from downhill rush in rainy season
glitter & how it bubble,
like young girl giggle falling over edge
“Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,..” (Derek Walcott)
1.
filthy feathers, that painted shoe, trampled headpiece, etcetera
choking drains down the route,
street-light blinking out, stale roti
Mornin-mornin. How yuh do?
Now is good time for a little reasonin,
when day jus’ beginin. Too besides is Sunday.
No rushin. Even God take day-off. Watch—
grass shinin, beach wash clean, an listen,
Kingfisher ramayin sweet on electric wire—
As a child, watching my mother cool the hot tea by pouring it
from one cup into another, then from the filled cup back
into the emptied one, and then again again,
the afternoon-or-evening-coloured liquid unfurling downward
I
If I had thought you would have gone so imperceptibly
so almost-without-my-knowing
I might have listened to your fluted love, the touterelles
in the orange grove, more intently
I
Si mwen té kwè ou té kai alé si tèlman san pèsèpsyon mwen
si tèlman san konnésans mwen
mwen pitèt té pé kouté lanmou-ou, an lanmou kon mizik an flit
kon chason lé toutwèl adan
In the devant-jour quiet, before the sun comes over
the shoulder of the world
there is no prayer; I gave up the going down on knees
in the morning of a world in flower;
when a thousand flowers dared to blossom, and somewhere
in a field of disparate ideas
He grew the biggest pears in Buhbayduss. Full-bodied
affairs that everyone kept watch on
each season, calculating pale-yellow prize
in the purse or on the tongue.
This redbrick man with a mean streak
to his generosity. Who worked the land
(A Bridgetown poem)
When the sun’s
no longer a wrecking crew,
when he’s wielding microscope
and precision tools, and presents
himself as an altogether different
class of brute
meet me
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
Pan
god of the reeds by the river
god of all music, god of all sound
wind whistling through leaves
wind wailing casuarinas bending…