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This new year dawned cool and full of fireworks. The night
sky is always a cathedral of stars we can barely acknowledge
beyond the trend of LED brightness trickling from streetlamps.
You wonder about the bird sitting on the telephone pole all night
dry season and the lawn yawns in gaping chasms,
mouths wide for rain. there’s only dust on the horizon.
i sit, eating penepis, warm ginger on my tongue
watching the birds look for water from dried gutters
after Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking…”
- A blackbird flew off the garden wall.
- Duly impoverished wall!
I do not know
but dawn
favours a grey house across the street from me,
painting it bright serene
aka
lighter salmon-coral
that fades toward pink-conch.
Why is my abode of lesser resort
and why, out walking—
The dew bristles with bright tufts of grass.
The only noise for one hundred
and sixty-six
square miles—
Ready as want to tout relief,
Between a sigh and anxious yield,
A blackbird calmly high-stepping
On the trash-gold of a cane-field.
A Poem from the Archives:
Vol. 19, No. 74, Pages 78–79 (December 1992)
I
The “Golondrina” is a sour hotel,
Redeemed, like Creole architecture,
By its ornate, wrought-iron balcony;
after the screaming bombs have stopped falling
& the rifle mouths have fallen silent
this island you have made still reverberates
resonates with your violence, an echo
a cycle, the newspeople tell us a thing
is not the thing our eyes tell us it is
Today my eyes are opened.
Today I see the city as it longs to be,
Tender, seen.
Only today is my heart wrecked
With a holy fire
That consumes the I in me.
I take the place of the broken body washed up on some beach off Trinidad. No worries. No tourist
from north America or Europe-and-other places would have their holiday spoiled, momentarily,
Prophets swelter in box houses
And beg rains to return.
Water our lives with gully washers,
Hammer galvanize roofs relentlessly,
This shrouding quiet. Despite the funereal bell,
the distant indiscretion of a backyard cockerel,
the measured shuffle of feet, the rustle
of attire appropriately dark.
And the quaint village church gathering
us in supplication, our number small
Tall brown & gaunt each day at 6
he would enter the Trou Rouge gap
stride with purpose to the pastel pink house
Where do we flee to now from Rafah?
Deir al-Balah? Jabalia?
To mass graves in yards of wasted hospitals?
To gutted streets, rubbled homes, emblems of denial
of the right to return?
An Ethiopian archbishop on TV
Told the story of Bob Marley’s baptism;
The cleric said the singer-songwriter
Saw him as a kind of father.
Stories came from the corn-shellers
On our dark verandah;
Bits of experiences
Arranged in pleasing patterns
Now being passed on;
I wanted to transfigure that door
Into a work of art,
As a ready-made,
By putting it in a golden frame
A gardener entered the lawn
With a ladder under his arm.
He hummed a dancehall piece I did not know,
Sometimes he chanted and sometimes he whistled.
He raised the ladder before a decorative shrub,
Searching for good, but finding only evil,
Job reached for poetry:
And heard it coming out of the whirlwind.
Jesus, on a Roman cross,
Charged with a sedition denied,
Reached for the poetry of the forsaken:
Found it in a Psalm.