Arts for the 21st Century

Kwame Dawes

Kwame Dawes

Born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica, Kwame Dawes is the author of thirteen books of poetry and many books of fiction, non-fiction and drama. His collection, ‘Hope’s Hospice’ was published by Peepal Tree Press in the spring of 2009. He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina where he directs the SC Poetry Initiative and the University of South Carolina Arts Institute. Kwame Dawes is the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival that takes place each May in Jamaica.

Elegy

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?  Their survival is another rhyming song;  to think that there in Cuba or England  or Nigeria, there may well have been  a cottage in the woods, abandoned suddenly—  a missionary leaving to follow a wife 

The Reunion

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,  people whispered and laughed and she was there,  her skin warm with chocolate smoothness, her hair  alarmingly white, these heavy coils of plaits falling about her. 
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