Note: the younger poet & the elder poet share poems often. they talk. the younger poet, writing much less than the elder, sends the elder a poem dedicated to the elders, now ancestors. the elder poet sends the younger a poem both looking back on life & coming to terms more and more with mortality as his peers leave this life behind. he does this all by wondering—inhabiting the present moment—what has it all come to, and what does it add up to, and where does it all go, what will be left?
they decide to publish their poems jointly, as a single entity:
shells
today I see nothing. I hear very little.
And I am moving towards the point of
speaking nothing: neither good nor evil
—Gordon Rohlehr
like ole soldier crab shells
they leave behind
name. address. last email sent.
strewn sand of anonymous particulars.
last remaining piece of beloved
plaited bread. tomorrow’s bread
unbroken. sweet-smelling. unnecessary.
all we know is Something heaved forward.
some Enormous Something. & receded.
& that the very Something that covered
them. held them here in the gathered salt &
loving dirt of its unexplaining underbosom.
O great heave of unbearable. love.
that no heart could help but dissolve in—
in waves. they come. waving or unwaving
they go. in waves. in salt. crystallized.
& we
from time to time—
still curled into our own
concerns—crawl like ole soldier
crabs into the shells of their names.
rattle their earthletters—
Ed-ward Baugh
Gor-dn Roh-lehr
Jenn-ifer Rah-him
smooth pebbles now
of Something perfected. syllableless.
weighted spaces between words or worlds—
the weathered glass shard that can no longer cut, no longer needs to.
just g/listens. that Enormous Something could leave
it behind or take it in deeper whenever it heaves
its love forward. again. when it recedes
the shells will sound like laughter. like Something
willfully breaking apart into Something
more.
Littoral
For Gordon Rohlehr (1942–2023)
my own ash my own alph mi own borders of outcry
—Kamau Brathwaite 1930–2020
To fishermen in the colored pirogue
both horizon and undulating lines
of hills are disappeared under Sahara harmattan,
like the inevitable oblivion
of a remarkable generation,
a tribe of writers, artists, musicians
who, according to Rohlehr,
inherited “a culture of terminality,”
suffered “the immense indifference” (Conrad)
of their careless communities, who,
transfixed in the ever-revolving kaleidoscopes
of current idolatries, considered past visionaries irrelevant,
their work now largely unread, unreviewed, few awards . . .
or so it seems, or so it always is,
the certainty of a sense of failure,
of wasted years, of not being understood,
not loved enough, forgotten in the headlines
and invitations to the white house on the hill,
to the honorary degrees and their heavy robes—
but on another hand, look a fisherman’s child
browsing in a library or box of discarded books, or old newspapers,
finding your poems, essays, art from another life
when you fervently envisioned faith and hope, and there, there,
the desert dust lifts off horizon, shore, green hills of your beloved island.
by Vladimir Lucien & John R. Lee, respectively
Vladimir Lucien is a writer from Saint Lucia. His debut poetry collection, Sounding Ground (Peepal Tree Press, 2014), won the 2015 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. He is a coeditor of Sent Lisi: Poems and Art of Saint Lucia (Cultural Development Foundation, 2014) and the screenwriter of the 2012 documentary The Merikins.
John Robert Lee is a Saint Lucian writer. His Belmont Portfolio: Poems was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2023. His After Poems, Psalms will be published by Peepal Tree in 2025. He regularly reviews and promotes Saint Lucian and Caribbean writers and writing at home and abroad, and he has been a frequent contributor to sx salon and Small Axe.