Church Rat Hymn / chuch-rat him
Here, I am / mi de-hee
Poor like / poo laik-a
Church rat / chuch-rat
Sitting on a gold mine / si-doun pon a gool main
Watch me, just look at me /
Poor like / poo laik-a
Church rat / chuch-rat
This time Yukuriba got gold
Gold, I could be rich like what’s his name? Croesus?
Now everybody want to know: You fall out you cradle
And bounce your head?
Gold . . . the vein running through the land
You ever see what could happen
To a place where gold’s working?
Well I see. I see Tumatumari and Omai
The bowels of the mother
That is deep deep delving—Earth-rape!
And they want to do that to Yukuriba
O! Is why nobody don’t understand? Why
Nobody can’t see?
Silt and sand and mud everything
They pile it up they pile it up
Till them turn island, island!
This old man come home after years away
He stand-up crying: I don’t remember islands . . .
My Innisfree my Walden my Peaceable Kingdom!
O—Magnificent Province! Of mud! Of flood! Of
Plantations of gold!
Changing minds—
Greedy ain’t easy—
You got to see yourself
You got to know yourself
You got to know everyone else
You got to work some Obeah
For God to compose my rat song
Geo- Trench / jii-oo- chrench
The trenches are one of the features
which remind us forcibly that almost
all of Georgetown was once estate land . . .
—N. E. Cameron, 1949
Graveyard / greev-yaad
Burial ground / beryal-gron
Yard plot tomb / yaad plat tuum
And cemetery / an semiterii
All this / aal a dis
Symmetry / simichrii
Rectilinearity [[[[]]]]
Self-similarity ((()))
Expanding, unfolding
Scales eroding, encoding
Re-mind-er over again and
Again in smaller dimensions
Or larger, or fractal, ones. Ones.
Ones:
Many
rais shuga kaafii kaatn kookoo /
Rice sugar coffee cotton cocoa
Seeds inside pods, chaff cane
Stalk atop cane, souls in and
Around bodies of stardust
Plants in plantation rows, estates
Real estate, small states inside
States lining coast and banks
Of rivers, canals and trenches
Drains and dams and George
Town’s Garden City streets
Covered over with concrete
Till we can’t breathe with
These lungs of the Earth’s
Gas-flared BEWARE windpipes
Bellowing wheezy dead-hymns
For alveoli and chloroplast
Dreams of reincarnation:
Please, remind us forcibly!
Seed Bullet / siid bolit
Julian Jumbi / juuliyan jombii
We call on you / wi kaal pon-ya
To blow good wind
To fall pon we like rain
Help slip the locks and
Chains of definition
We must borrow some
Magical grease of old to
Perform our feats on oil
Thiefs so food can share
Everywhere clothes to wear
Home with yard fruits to bear
Flowers to pick and parties to
Prepare instead of eternal wakes.
Joan Cambridge-Mayfield is an Afro-feminist ecological defender, a former leading member of Guyana’s press corps, the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home (Ticknor and Fields, 1987), and the coauthor, with Jeremy Jacob Peretz, of Jombii Jamborii (Ugly Duckling, 2025). Her writing has appeared in Antioch Review and Asymptote and was anthologized in Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (Pantheon Books, 1992) and An Anthology of Non-Conformism: Rebel Wom!n Words, Ways, and Wonders (DIO Press, 2024). Aunty Joan is also fellow traveler with and widow of Julian Mayfield, forever following his profound jumbi wisdom, strength, and guidance.
Jeremy Jacob Peretz is a poet and an educator whose scholarship, writing, and multimedia practice have been widely recognized, including with the Caribbean Studies Association’s biennial Best Dissertation Award and a Pushcart Prize nomination. Jeremy is a coauthor and translator, with Joan Cambridge-Mayfield, of Jombii Jamborii (Ugly Duckling, 2025), with essays, poems, and films available through a range of venues, including African American Review, Anthropology News, Asymptote, Caribbean Quarterly, and Massachusetts Review. Jeremy holds a PhD in culture and performance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and teaches in the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Guyana.