Marked

The poet stands beside the soldiers;
he is dressed in cloths of yellow linen;
in his hand a bucket of sepia ink sloshes
like the blood of protection; in his other,
the brush, its bristles gathered to a point.
Outside a world will wonder at the wrath
of sweet peace, making God who has
his history of filling the streets
with the mutilated body of sinners,
who understands the language
of stinking corpses, who knows
mercy and the absence of memory,
whose sorrow was heaviest
when one slender body stretched
and split on a slab of wood.
The poet must step into the city
to write haiku on the foreheads
of those who lament, bewildered
by the wickedness of the people;
lines of revelation in the senna
hieroglyphs; a mark, a brand,
a stroke of hope on the lintels
of their faces. The poet must weep
when he returns, his linen
garments brown with the blood
of promise, his feet sticky
with the spilled blood of despair.
A soh it go.

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Drought

Today the rain came
but it was “fake rain”
not enough water to drench this
dry island.
“The world is off its axis,
since the earthquake in Haiti,
and only Mother Nature can fix it,”
the taxi driver said.
Bleached-bone clouds
sock the mountains
but they won’t bring rain
just mist as thick as smoke
obscuring the view of Kingston.
We hope real rain soon comes
rain that fills drains
and slicks cotton to skin.
Not flooding rain or hurricane
but real rain
real rain

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Water Rushes Like Memory

Notes of evening
            play upon sand,
                        scatter dried stars
                                    from treetops.

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Garfield Ellis

Excerpt from the unpublished novel “The Angel’s Share”

I am, not a selfish man. I love much, much more than myself.

I love my father.

For here I am this morning, sandwiched between two trucks on the Flat Bridge, traffic backed up on both sides to god knows how far? It is seven o’clock and still I am not even half way to Hampshire. And with every honk of an angry horn, or every stop and start and stutter of the vehicles in the line, every inching forward of the traffic, I feel my career disappearing slowly behind me. So how could I be a selfish man? How could I not love my father? I am sacrificing my day for him; I am sacrificing a board meeting for him; I am sacrificing my career for him.

I have sacrificed a woman for him. (more…)

Émille Hunt

The music insists that you dance; if it tells the troubles of a brother, the music says dance. Dance to the hurt! Dance! If you catching hell, dance, and the government don’t care, dance! Your woman take your money and run away with another man, dance. Dance! Dance! Dance! It is in dancing you ward off evil. Dancing is a chant that cuts off the power from the devil. Dance! Dance! Dance! Carnival brings this dancing to every crevice on this hill.
—Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance

Now, when Rita Rahming son, Stan, did get shoot down dead by police walking home, everybody did know two things: they kill a innocent boy and Stan funeral was going to have one of the biggest Junkanoo rush out Hillview Cemetery every see.

Everybody did know Rita son was a good boy. Rita gave everything she had to see that boy straight, and then for him just to get shoot down by police, took the last bit of life she had left in her. And now, police fixing they mouth to tell her that they going to lock up anybody that come to rush and play Junkanoo at the graveside. (more…)