He said to me, “You’re a poet.
Make these days brighter.
Turn the world into glass. Give us
your seer’s eyes to see the red
bougainvillea flower again, the green
of palm trees under grey, volcanic ash
that for all its birthing from fury and fire,
reminds us of what we will become.
Call out your Muse. Now. That ancient figure
who claims to span the earth and sky
all times and seasons,
so she may counsel and inspire.”
And so, under the stained-glass windows
of The St. Michael’s Cathedral,
an Easter Sunday,
while the pipe organ stands in awed silence,
The Nicholas Brancker Band
is a study in plasticity:
hands bodies in motion
in fusion
steel-pan piano
violin guitar
trumpet trombone
drum
saxophone
Beethoven’s Für Elise romps
with Kitchener’s Pan in A Minor,
Beautiful, Beautiful Barbados glides
through Bach’s Prelude in C,
A grandmother hums
under Brancker’s bass guitar:
The King of Love My Shepherd is,
Whose goodness faileth never.
And our Mahalia sings us, reggae-style,
over another mountain:
we’ll walk it out
a thousand times
if need be—
we’ll walk it out.
Final stanza a reflection of the song Rise Up by Andra Day