Let Me Discover Myself and other poems

From here hills fold one into another

green into smoke of distant grey;

the aloneness of our distance wraps around me 

like this Monier mist in January;

a mobile phone on the breakfast table 

does not bring back the hot touch of flesh,

your fingers on my cheek, on my chest

the nipples at the summits of your breasts.

It was here at the top of the world

that I would slip from the highs of pulsing nipples 

to nestle between your thighs, naked,

unfettered, in the blitheness of youth.

Our hills were unending folds of emerald haze

beneath whose sheets an island moved to the poetry

of a rhythm so free as to be singularly

you and me.  And the small hours would slip 

under cool cotton uncovering the simple lusts

that moved us: from these heights we thought, “how deep!”

And then on a morning like this one

I woke and you were gone.  I stared through 

a latticed window, through the mist;

the year had begun with the January rain

and I was thinking I’d begin again

where hills recede indistinctly to the past

and earth ends offering up in the blue air

the incense of an unbelieving prayer for the soul, ethos

of an island people slipping away from us:

you somewhere in the diasporic wind, 

and me remote in hand

still wanting somehow to hold on.

Morning coffee

takes me back 

to the archives of my childhood

my grandmother

her dibélwè

constant as her morning prayers

brewing café nwè

from home-grown coffee beans;

waking us at 5

when the feisty scramble 

for mango la rose,

had ended with their season

and there was no reason

to jump out of bed

but morning coffee...

This morning

I am drinking

Nescafé.

(tremblement de terre, ou la séisme)

I

The earth trembled beneath Port Au Prince

and his faith in the Saints and the Spirits of his Ancestors trembled

then fell, unnerved, among the rubble and the dead

and trembled again…

II

In a city where the dead do not rise,

les zombis notwithstanding,

and the stench is insufferable and suffocating

the living must rise from the rubble and the dying of a quake

whose aftershocks transcend two centuries

that bespeak the oppression of empires

that have denied them the hand of brotherhood;

Here, where stars have stripped the hills

of the green beginnings of clear rivers

whose stripes uncoil now, in snakes that flail

with the brown venom of floods,

hope ebbs like blood on screaming earth.

III

Agony

of living death through a loud chasm;

a black hole lost among white stars

to the blue-dark, engorging abyss of 

market economies

are no myth.

No myth, the machetes of les macoutes

spilling the blood of all their Saints 

(Toussaint to Aristide’s faithful)

in a long, long age, shaking faith and drowning the red earth of soul.

Still, the living rise from the hopelessness of their dying…

You’re not eating Graeme, its sterile seed 

scooped out for artificial vanilla ices

savoured on “plantations by the sea”

You’re biting deep

into amply flavoured, natural, elongated

Mangue Pont — 

not a hybrid or grafted

not genetically altered by food conglomerates

who grow money on trees

Just grown in the backyard in La Retraite,

Monchy, Canaries where they are gathered

by children whose joy is in them (every morsel,

mouth-dripping and yellow flesh); gathered

by women who take them to the market on Friday

For us

who sink our teeth into palpable flesh of islands

deep

down

to living

seed.

“To betray philosophy is the gentle treason

of poets…” — Walcott

Iguana in the crackling underbrush that 

suddenly ignites an emerald furore of hills 

after rains that end the long days of dearth and drought,

after a season of lingering doubt,

will refresh this page; must catch again, strangely

in the rain, an allure of the word 

efflorescing in youth

yet not arrogating to my pen a search for truth – 

a search for being consumes this page.

Calm yourself, calm the raging in your head like 

the raging of a highway going nowhere 

threatening a lizard’s fragile wilderness; or

a raging that explodes from the box into which

they have forced you while they exhort you

to think “out of the box”.

A raging that confounds

disingenuous catch-phrases, buzz-words,

the carefully spun images, the postulation

that being is that which we perceive – when

my only truth begins with you:

I recall now, a long-gone April, 

our flying the ungridded skies of a boy’s forgotten kite,

an untamed coast, the tearing wind, haze

recalcitrant on water, and you

stubborn and resolute, eternal Word.

In red autumn the Oklahoma plains are plain

and featureless

grey trailer houses inflict the landscape

with an uneventful sameness

until, suddenly, you come upon that part of town

with fingers of manicured gardens

and driveways that roll softly to discreet façades 

of houses outside of which you see no one.

Firs along languid streets smell like damp carpet.

Miles from here, past a city just waking

the bowed fossils of bison grazing on a prairie’s last stand 

before it withers into history, are an anachronism.

This has to be what is left of the place in the song where buffalo roam

and curious meerkats startle the furtive grass 

along a boy’s way home.

In childhood I wondered about this:

how does a boy of eight

for whom an island circumscribed by mountains is the universe

conceptualise this?

Further on where hills rise distantly

and a river falls to eternal death or glory,

to the far thunder of memory, we visit a museum – 

Pat and I. We are reminded we are aliens estranged

among immigrants whose patrimony is 

that they pushed Geronimo over these falls

to a glory recognised after all

in the muted thunder of memory – only;

these images of Sauteurs!

A people’s story, a fossil framed in a gallery.

Now Pat and I are here in the autumn of our years,

our summer having gone so quickly.

That they have bequeathed us the leisure to

smell the flowers,

to explore in symmetry and perspective the soaring flight

of supercilious hawk

and how it perceives the world from heights

of need not exhilaration;

and they have given us the word  

that we may be, that we may exult

as the masterpiece exults in the beauty 

of his creator – a mirror image in clear water;

that they have condescended to invest us

with their humanness is frightening!

Frightening because

in antithesis to this narrative

of being, of their word defining – us,

our frailties, faults, culpabilities 

and grudgingly sometimes, our beauties,

there is Sesenne; and Silou, unsung but

a voice ever in my memory, always as

the wind through a corridor, through scrub

through ageing coconut palms, from Fond d’Or.

The voice rising lithe on a goatskin’s throb

was ours – always ours, always…

In the beginning was our word

and yet we spoke their word, in ways that were ours,

because before their word there was always 

the Word, our word

You see, their word was the serpent’s speaking

with honeyed venom from a tree of knowledge

from which we dare not choose – and yet we chose

life in the burgeoning flowers, the fruit elating 

from branches, branches etching the calligraphy

of hills, hills reaching up to clouds

that burst earthward in pure, unadulterated water,

Guillen’s water, clear water mirroring

our image in its imperfection  — 

NOTES:

 L.5 “dibélwè”, Saint Lucian French Kwéyòl for traditional coffee maker. Also Kafétyè.

L.7 “café nwè”, literally black coffee but refers here to traditional ground coffee. Also “café moulu”

Ll. 11-12, “mango la rose”, “mango dou-i-dou” two of the many mango varieties common in Saint Lucia

L.26 “Giltonn”, he was a traditional drummer in the community of La Carrière, Dennery, Saint Lucia from which the Author hails. “Silou Sumayah” was a traditional singer (chanterelle/Chantwèl) of Afro-East Indian decent whom he accompanied at traditional kont sessions or séances. She is also referred to in the poem “Clear Water” by the author.

Oklahoma 

L.28 “Sauteurs”, cliffs in Grenada, Eastern Caribbean, where a number of indigenous Kalinago people were said to have leapt to their deaths rather than succumb to enslavement by European settlers. 

L.13 “touterelles”, also “toutwèl”, Saint Lucian French Kwéyòl for the dove species “Zenaida a. Zenaida”.

L.16 “Sesenne”, Dame Selipha “Sesenne” Descartes, Saint Lucia’s officially recognized cultural icon, traditional chanterelle/chantwèl and “Queen of Culture”.