"Each day we die a little death beneath the sun."
– Denis Williams, Kyk-Over-Al (1949)
Everything sweet, waits to welcome you
gyurl, gyal
bai
bannas
home.
Weathered white old timber houses await the colours of fire
as champion hose & hydrant
wait
for water. Last season
bodies of innocence "massacred" piled up on the front page,
soft
loved faces
closed, limbs like chopped cane bundled for loading;
like on Nazi death camp wagons, though not like Uganda. O,
the other day young girl turn back, take one flying leap into Kaieteur.
Fisher men losing boats to pirates with skull &
crossbones &
night
splintering pistols.
Rice fields waiting for flood, singing insects for blood.
Old estate cane fields spread flat 'til
swank hotel & casino hoist up like hiphiphooray! on their back.
Store fronts waiting for plate-glass reinforcements; we have escalators
now
everybody thiefing.
At the windows of high wind-wrapped buildings you could see
below rusting
corrugated roofs which does look real bad. O,
Ministers promise to "commission", "fast track", "task team" stagnant
villages if only on fours they behave; pour in
millions and billions more millions
like syrup
like red ants over dry mud lake.
Roadways built by the Dutch for walking
barefoot cycling
& Land Rover
leave only grass verge,
watch out for headless horsemen mummifying wheels escorting sirens.
At the stop of forest felling greenheart men wait for river apparitions;
and hydro (with Ph.D) coming like snakeinyuhgrass.
River ferries waiting for spare revenue, the bathrooms smell
of pink hibiscus. Gold men done
lose
their diamond
whores and hammocks to stakeholder designs;
they must stay awake for poachers and border movers.
Teachers waiting for letters of acceptance, leaving school chil'ren
one
O level
away from the "braid hair criminals" > the penal colony. Athletes
files
and grandparents slipping away like bourgeois habits,
so animals gardens dreaming language suffering real bad. O,
Regions 4 3 2 1 lost their place names & memories; they wait
to be inducted into the Hall of new paradigm shifts.
Robes of theory and sermon, you think, would protect women
during power cuts
& power
demands;
the truth like lonely nipples hides from power;
the truth waits in the body's every folded crevice.
Le'me stop: we
not supposed to see or call evil,
give the country bad name.
O, wait:
latest
climate report
calls for periods of tribe entrenchment, thinning hair, dogma screws, shut
up
about race -
sustainable darkness, right! all over the land.
– W.W.
EVENING DROWNED IN A DRY SWAMP
The flat quarrel of frogs belching between gulps
of rain slapped down by a sky the very mother
of indifference, an unerasable grey,
or the silver snoring of the six-o-clock bee
under the brittle drilling of deaf crickets
forging twilight's soft breast into an armour-plate
against the neverending hammering curse
of dogs beaten hollow between rooftops of tin
pelting their bricks of rage to have them hover
in the mind's sky like clouds of blank slate or leaden
farts of thunder heard but not heard as having
to be heard like the growls snarls yelps of beaten numb
men caught writhing in cobwebs of dumb memory,
in nets of radio-prattle or in tight cages
of lashing song and dance fuelled by drumming
veins swollen with thudding rum, the beat of hearts pumped
by the urge to dare, by aspirins of accept.
- © Brian Chan 2000
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 