Worlds
little girl
you don’t come
from my world
on your belly
in the grass
reading book
flowers
in your head
no dread
see
me
here
up
a
tree
looking
ackee
not my tree
not my ackee
but them
can always
sell
and
hungry
is hell
Five Senryū
1
Reads poems about
Rodney King. About riots
white poet says nothing.
2
Dread Scott make a flag.
It say “A MAN WAS LYNCHED BY
POLICE YESTERDAY.”
3
George Floyd kneed to death
leverages his final breath
“Mama, Ma—I’m through.”
4
Breanna them kill
you in your very own yard
and think them pay dear.
5
Black bodies swinging
from a tree. What on earth is
poetry to me?
Watch this space
make it find it open it up
star struck gaze into it consider
it for breath and breadth waste it
be pressed for it for ten to one back
to back is murder so no don’t cap it free
it up look off into it leave earth in fumes for
it bewildered even as it is now for a space in
time space time continuum is high we now
high apprehensively aloft in need of sober
grounding like when there is too much
between one period and another in
the periodic table trust a woman
trust a bloodless woman to
land a man with a bump!
Pamela Mordecai writes poetry and long and short fiction. She is the author of A Fierce Green Place: new and selected poems (New Directions, 2022) and de book of Joseph (Mawenzi House, 2022), which is third in her Patwa series of book-length performance poems on the life of Jesus; she is currently working on the fourth book, “de book of Mary Magdalene.” Her poetry has been translated into Spanish, French, Romanian, and Serbian and is archived at https://mordecai.citl.mun.ca/ and dLoc. She divides her time between Kingston, Jamaica, and Toronto.