Ghosts’ Lament
Their ghosts
walk the lawn.
They leave shadows.
Shadows slant in the setting sun,
as someone beats a
pan;
a skanking Marley jam.
The ancestors walk
in the shadow of these
fortified walls,
where women were
raped,
and blood mixed with the diesel
and gun oil spilling into
the sea.
The ancestors cry
at their legacy erased,
at another’s legacy embraced.
Joanne C. Hillhouse is the author of Oh Gad!—a novel scheduled for publication in 2012. A University of the West Indies graduate and international fellowship recipient to the Breadloaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, Hillhouse also participated in the Caribbean Fiction Writers Summer Institute at the University of Miami. There she began work on her first book, The Boy from Willow Bend, which is on the reading list for Antigua and Barbuda’s schools. For more, visit http://www.jhohadli.com.