- for Eric Roach

 

 

 

I didn't want this poem to come

from the torn mouth,

I didn't want this poem to come

from his salt body,

 

but I will tell you what he celebrated:

 

He writes of the wall with spilling coralita

from the rim of the rich garden

and the clean dirt yard

clean as the parlour table

with a yellow tree

an ackee, an almond

a pomegranate

in the clear vase of sunlight;

 

sometimes he put his finger

on the pulse of the wind,

when he heard the sea in the cedars.

He went swimming to Africa,

but he felt tired;

he chose that way

to reach his ancestors.

 

No, I did not want to write this,

but, doesn't the sunrise 

force itself through the curtain

of the trembling eyelids?

When the cows are statues in the misting field

that sweats out the dew,

and the horse lifts its iron head

and the jaws of the sugar mules

ruminate and grind like the factory?

I did not want to hear it again,

the echo of broken windmills,

the mutter of the wild yams creeping

over the broken palings,

the noise of the moss

stitching the stone barracoons,

 

but the rain breaks

on the foreheads of the wild yams,

the dooryard opens the voice

of his rusty theme,

and the first quick drops of the drizzle,

the libations to Shango,

dry fast as sweat on the forehead

and our tears also.

 

The peasant reeks sweetly of bush,

he smells the same as his donkey--

they smell of the high, high country

of clouds and stunted pines--

the man wipes his hand

that is large as a yam

and as crusty with dirt

across the tobacco-stained

paling stumps of his torn mouth,

he rinses with the mountain dew,

and he spits out pity.

 

I did not want it to come,

but sometimes, under the armpit

of the hot sky over the country,

 

the wind smells of salt

and a certain breeze lifts

the sprigs of the coralita

as if, like us,

lifting our heads, at our happiest,

it too smells of the freshness of life.