Peelin Orange
Page 6
drag slower and slower until the term
you didn’t walk: your classes came
to see you fade from ailing to infirm.
When you retired from teaching, as you had to –
your body wouldn’t serve your driving will –
we built a special house to cage you in
so anyone could come and see you still.
The few occasions when I looked you up
I saw a living carcass wasting slow,
that sprightliness of mind a crudish irony
when all your wretched limbs were withering so.
Without a conscious plan to be neglectful
I didn’t seem to find the time
to drop in for your running commentary
on what you called ‘the national pantomime’.
I wonder whether time has stolen from me
something that matters deeply (or should do)
and whether anything I manage now will ever
relieve my guilt about neglecting you.
And when you die I know I shall be sorry,
remembering your kindness. But the fear
of facing death stops me from coming
to see you dying smiling in your chair.
OUTING
A rush of boys reporting in.
Enquiry, and a hush.
‘Drowned, drowned, Marriott is drowned.’
That curious thirst for detail swells;
in waves the teachers rise
like undertakers
and descend the cold stone steps.
THE CASTLE
His mother told him of the king’s
enormous thick-walled castle where
with lots of yellow courtiers
he kept his yellow court of fear.
The bold knight hopped a milk-white horse,
spurred fiercely, keen as anything;
resolved, this honourable knight,
to slay that fearful king.
The giddy knight rode hard and fast.
At dusk he heaved a dreadful sigh:
at last, that frightful yellow flag
against the darkening sky!
Living is Fearing. Tired, he read
the writing on the castle wall,
and braced himself to slay that king
who terrifies us all.
The drawbridge down, the knight spurred hard,
galloping into battle;
but as he neared, the bridge pulled up
with a disdainful rattle.
Too late to stop, he took the plunge;
accoutred well, he couldn’t float;
and, loud exclaiming ‘Death to Fear!’,
he drowned himself in the moat.
HERITAGE
whispering ancestors
enfold me in their loving
ghostly immanence
LITERARY EVENING, JAMAICA
In a dusty old crumbling building just fit for rats
and much too large for precious poetry circles
the culture fans sat scattered in the first ten rows
listening for English poetry.
Geoff read Larkin beautifully, Enright too,
and Michael Saunders talked between the poems:
‘I don’t say they are wonderful,’ he said,
‘and would not say that anybody says
they’re great. I offer them
as two fair English poets writing nowadays.
They’re anti-gesture, anti-flatulence,
they speak their quiet honesties without pretence.’
The longer section of the evening’s programme
was poems by the locals, undergraduates,
some coarse, some wild, and many violent,
all bloody with the strains of rape and childbirth,
screaming hot curses anti-slavery,
‘Down with the limey bastards! Up the blacks!
Chr-rist! Let’s tear the painted paper
off all the blasted cracks!’
The more I heard the more it seemed
a pretty rotten choice to read us Larkin,
dull-mannered, scared, regressive Phil,
saying No to everything or Soon, Not Yet.
So many bulging poets must have blushed
and wondered where the hell they’d ever get
with noisy poems, brash, self-conscious, colourful,
and feared that maybe they were born too crude.
Maybe they were; but it was bloody rude
seeming to ask for things that don’t belong out here
where sun shines hot and love is plentiful.
For to us standing here, a naked nation
bracing ourselves for blows, what use
is fearfulness and bland negation?
What now if honesty should choose
to say, in all this world’s confusion,
that we are still too young for disillusion?
JAMAICA 1979
a stone’s throw
from the revolutionary
slogans on the wall
an old black woman
scavenging
in ruins
Cars idle
at the traffic lights
waiting for green
REPRISE
What now if honesty should choose
to say, in all this world’s confusion,
that we are still too young for disillusion?
Well, that was 1962.
And here we are, a fractured nation
jumping up in celebration
of fifty years of chattering pretence
at independence,
though decades of political confusion
have made the growing rough,
and we’re now old enough
for disillusion.
THE ROACHES
We had a home. The roaches came
to stay. They spread until they had control
of kitchen, pantry, study, then the whole
damned house. We fought them, but the game
was set. We sprayed, and they kept breeding all the same.
We found a house with plenty space,
clean and dry and full of light.
We checked beneath the sink – no roach in sight.
We checked the cupboards – not a trace
of roaches. No roach anyplace.
And so we moved.
The roaches came.
We sprayed, but they kept breeding all the same.
SENTENCES FOR HERITAGE WEEK
Mine history
for the energy it frees.
Do not spend precious time
hanging from family trees.
THE EARLY REBELS
Time and the changing passions played them tricks,
Killing the shop-soiled resolutions dead.
Gone are the early angry promises
Of rich men squeezed, of capitalists bled.
More adult honesties have straightened ties
And brushed the dinner-jackets clean,
Maturer minds have smelt out fallacies
And redefined what thinkers mean.
Hope drives a chromium symbol now
And smiles a toothpaste passion to the poor,
With colder eloquence explaining how
The young were foolish when they swore
They’d see those dunghills dank and dreary
All replaced by bright new flats:
Good sense was never youthful fury
And rash young promises by brats …
‘Let’s drink a loyal toast to dedication:
We mean the same but youth is past;
We are the fathers of our nation,
The thinking leaders come at last.
Cheers for the faith of simple minds,
Cheers for the love of humble friends;
Love does not alter when it finds
That we have redefined its ends.’
THE MILITANT
was into paint
ing
butterflies
& now
is into jackboots
stomping painters
painting butterflies
MAVERICK
They charged him with a lack of guts
and still he wouldn’t do as they desired;
to all their quick solutions offering buts
instead of the agreement they required.
They dropped him from the inner group,
achieving thus consensus of a fashion.
The relics were a loyal troop
who could be certified for passion.
GROUNATION
for Cedric Brooks
out of that pain
that bondage
heavy heavy sounds
our brothers’ weary march
our shackled trip
a joyful horn takes off
to freedom time
remembered & foretold
Release I brother let me go
let my people go
home to Ethiopia
in the mind
MUNTU
for Janheinz Jahn
My ancestors
alive inside the daylight
closed up invisible in air
float from the pages of your book.
We called their names.
Enter my father, laughing,
a gregarious black.
Behind him his black father,
formidable, stern.
Fathers who fathered me.
My mother’s mother shuffles in,
dragging her gentleness along the glare.
She indicates her father,
who looks white.
I start to hear the irons clink.
He dissipates my terror with a wink.
POST-COLONIAL IDENTITY
The language they’re conducted in
dictates the play in these debates.
Good english, as they say, discriminates.
White people language white as sin.
FOR QUEEN ELIZABETH II
Longest reigning British Head of State
(September 2015)
You have been Jamaica’s
Head of State
till now
Your Majesty
But it is not
in ceremonial fealty
we salute
this latest marker
in your life
It is in recognition
of exemplary
performance
in a role
that was not yours
before the day
you learnt you really
might inherit a throne
We celebrate
your dignified embrace
of duty all these years
and your perennial
graciousness
MONTAGE
England, autumn, dusk –
so different from that quarter-hour
at home when darkness drops:
there’s no flamboyant fireball
laughing a promise to return;
only a muted, lingering farewell,
and day has passed to evening.
HEY, REF!
Not long ago
that godlike player
dribbled round each obstacle
or shoulder-charged like stone.
Now time is marking him.
Hey, Ref, that’s foul!
Play on.
Beyond the touchline,
flabby, bent,
more ancient idols watch
and wait.
The whistle blows. Full time.
TOURNAMENT
Nostalgic devils ‘playing for fun’
in their declining years,
they scramble till the match is done
and smile as if to say, ‘Who cares?’
That loser, sweltering
in bed, contending with a sheet,
he cares. He’s grappling
with midnight memories of defeat.
TO AN INTERVIEWER
for Usain Bolt
Greatness
is to false-start
an to feel di world
stop dead
Mi draw mi shirt off
leave di track
an watch di race
in shock
Greatness is to look inside
di failure
try mi best
to swallow up di pain
Greatness is
to get mi head to settle
on di nex event
run right dis time
an hear di stadium
goh wild
SWIMMER
That powerful swimmer
furrowing the pool
towards the final wall …
Mourn him, the crumpled athlete:
his element was water;
now they’ll sink him
in the ground, he’s gone
to rust, that muscled plough.
UNIVERSITY STUDY
The window opened
on a tangled growth
of shrub.
He moved his wooden desk.
Second reel, New Life:
a barbed-wire fence
rough cobblestones
a solitary tree
and brown leaves
falling, falling.
He moved the damn desk back.
O brave new world:
incipient jungle
just outside.
He drew the curtains
and stayed in.
But all day long
the mind projected
images
one tree alone
self-strangled shrub
and brown leaves
falling free
LECTURER
He came on like a navigator
with complicated options to unravel
who fifty minutes later
had not yet sorted out which way to travel.
FETE
Look that fellow how he staring
at the boys in the band
with a half-empty beer-bottle
dangling from he hand.
Hooked, man, gasping for air
and posing casual, he frown
then suck the beer
and rest the bottle down.
Room full of empties.
TEACHER
for Bill Carr
Your foreign intervention helped
identify our region. We
give thanks (now you have left us)
finally.
Remembering you, I celebrate
imprudent anger, I commemorate
your obstinate anxiety to share.
True men, you tried to teach us, show they care.
ON CAMPUS, MURDER
The gentlemen were rough
trade, and the world closed in
on you, grabbing, jabbing
in the eye, the belly of
your need. Kindness
was never enough.
Koo deh. Him dead fi true.
Sun-hot and the glare
of strangers
drilling through
pretences,
a swarm of judges
rubbishing
your delicate defences.
HAVING EYES THAT SEE
The blind man led by a little boy
goes tap-tap-tapping down the street,
and foolishly I feel accused
for having eyes that see.
That blind man at the bus stop regularly
feeling along the window’s edge –
‘Thanks, God bless you,’ shuffling on –
breeds like a chigger in my mind.
And leafing through a magazine
I am confronted by an ad,
‘Tell me, what colour is the wind?’
I shan’t let spurious guilt
take hold and steer me
into gloom, and yet
I think I see
&nb
sp; a shadowy connection.
MEETING
I
An unfamiliar bed
of radicals. And me
looking to root
out lies.
A nightmare –
comrade after comrade
springing
up to criticize!
I took
to planting
questions
in your eyes.
II
spuriously dry
we banter
knowing
something
critical
is growing
underground
a movement
threatening
solidarity
REMEMBERING JOHN LA ROSE