Poet Mother (for Lorna Goodison)
i pray i find a genre of truth between lines
and speak with the same breath as yours
careful, cutting
always precise
entitled by our ancestral paradise: grandmothers in verandahs
as i began my writing ritual
this morning
i remembered
Harvey River
trickling
down
notes
the stereo played Miles
Davis’s so what
women in the kitchen brewed mountain coffee
and poured over old royal teacups
In My Mother’s Backyard
for my mother and Joan Mason
she was cocoa brown skin girl from a derelict village
Four Roads Tamana
she bathed in barrel water, ate blue food, ate what she grew
wore her best dress, underwear, shoes
she was poor
her family knew children were blessings, not expenses
fourth daughter of tapia housewife
cocoa panyol creation damned by colonization
her hair (my mother’s mother’s, that is)
curled like winds bending around bamboo shoots
carrying whispers of douens and Papa Bois
i imagine my mother in tears
my grandmother with a rat-tail comb
ordering the dense forests of her daughters’ hair
years later, never would she have known
she would be tugging the hair of her son
in the patio at the back of the house
(my mother, that is)
as a child, they called me wild, uncivilized
for my mother, i was root
root in our backyard root in the bush root in history
at times, she requested cut your hair, son
cut your hair
on my way to school cut your hair, son
cut your hair . . .
but I admire your power
to fight for what you believe in
your head hard
just like your father’s
Ma Forde
in my first week in Laventille, the imam visited
he knew my father before, before ’90, before ’70
he fondly remembered my grandmother, Ma Forde
whom i’ve known only by one wedding picture
stocky Black woman in navy-blue dress
forehead glistening from the broiled country church
the imam confirmed my aunt’s claim—she was a scientist
i was told, she knew how to plant
banana trees as part of specialized planning
to balance infants’ hunger and aches
she bent between wifely duties and cleaning
her brain was busy working out urban equations
the imam looked tired during the flânerie about memory’s lanes
the breeze in Laventille no longer put him at ease
he couldn’t journey through hills, through Belmont
through Town as he did in his board house boyhood
Ma Forde’s lot is now vacant, my father, along with friends
gone down the road and would not come back
Maternal Geographies
it’s hard to explain but i am seeing my mother’s face
in the surface of East Port-of-Spain
insistent caregivers combing girls’ plaits
on house steps
yes sweetie, all for you lovin’, street vendors say
counting up change
there is a heaven schoolchildren feel
when mothers return home in KFC uniforms and seamstress-altered uniforms
fast girls breastfeed in the best and worst conditions
outside of state shame policy
Tanti everywhere
crossing each street like a station
them so is the same as my mother
praying for more miracles
for every house on stilts and unpainted wall
for little hopes
found in each gold link around a baby’s hand
I Take After She
My mother sing backup. She make me and tomorrow she back out ready to sing. Breastfeed me and change diaper backstage. She had was to record she own song in studio, but in them time Calypso King was for man to win. And if you think that man who singing ’bout Williams and how he glad we leave England and what Jean and Dinah do shopping know something, well, music good fool you from seeing who make the refrain and cloud clap, encore, encore, again and again. My mother pass ’04. All the smoking get she sick. Is other people pipe kill my crapaud. In the village, people does still ask for me. Them say they see me grow up in tent. Dog eh make cat. I hear when I walking down the hill, is same way I thick & round & like to sing, is just like my mother. I still have some of she songs on cassette player. God, that woman voice could spin.
Amílcar Peter Sanatan is an interdisciplinary Caribbean artist, educator, and activist. He is from Trinidad and Tobago, currently working between East Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and Helsinki, Finland. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks: About Kingston (Peekash Press, 2025) and The Black Flâneur: Diary of Dizain Poems, Anthropology of Hurt (Ethel Zine and Micro Press, 2025).