OWN

A road razzled with restaurant signs and menu boards,
lights twinkling in the eaves, winking a come-on at the tourists;
glimpses—between the tall hedges—of hotel staff, busy
in black and white, a slash of colour, slice of a smile;
the strip, a tourism hotspot, cools down in the evening,
 then flares up, a febrile condition, in the night.
i try to understand a whole economy based on fantasies—
beach umbrella, sipping a culture on the rocks, Stella’s groove—
and ponder: for some, in fact, we did begin as fantasies—Cipango, El Dorado—
then were traded down to sweating-stink, slave-holding colony.
So centuries later, on a tropical Friday night, what now? What?
You can’t dissolve history in a fruit punch, make it delish.
Even the sugar in the coffee has a bitter aftertaste
when you know. The charcoal briquettes make the barbecue
then become ash. You see it everywhere, in everything.
See what, though? What exactly do i see?
This hedged-in hotel, with a glance of bustling workers,
and built on the remains of what had been the village cemetery,
is locally owned. A Black industrious couple from industrious families
and captains now of the twinkling industry of fantasy.
No absentee plantation owner’s property, this—a native enterprise.
Why my disquiet, then? Skeletons under the tiled floors?
Gravestones and bones crunched in with the numbers?
Wincing, the thought of that but—no, what stabs the mind
is that the buried could not hold even that final patch of ground as theirs.
And their descendants hustling in the palace of fantasies above them
don’t own it—not even in fantasy.
And I’m thinking that what may finally resolve this history,
shred the black and white raiments it is clothed in,
is when they own
not only the hotel, its ground, the other ancestral grounds,
but also
their own history.