Friday, May 22, 2009


“I don’t remember exactly when, but one Sunday recently, I decided to go to church to attend mass. After some time, I realized that I was in the wrong church- it was a Protestant church.
I was about to leave, but the vicar was just beginning his sermon, and I thought it would be rude to get up at that point, and it was a real blessing, because that day I heard things I very much needed to hear.
He said something like:
“In all the languages in the world, there is the same proverb: ‘What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over.’ Well I say that there isn’t an ounce of truth in it. The further off they are, the closer to the heart are all those feelings that we try to repress and forget. If we’re in exile, we want to store away every tiny memory of our roots. If we’re far from the person we love, everyone we pass in the street reminds us of them.
“The gospels and all the sacred texts of all religions were written in exile, in search of God’s understanding, of the faith that moves whole peoples, of the pilgrimage of souls wandering the face of the Earth. Our ancestors did not know, as we do not know, what the Divinity expects from our lives- and it is out of that doubt that books are written, pictures painted, because we don’t want to forget who we are- nor can we.”

- Diary of Maria the prostitute,
Eleven Minutes
Paulo Coelho.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

For the Chief and Aripo.


Engaged colours dialogue
In compromise of space,
Each pigment plasters the detail
Of a nation summoned to rise from the earth,
The bulging embryo of stifled stillbirth
Only perverting the rhythm of
This labour of love,
But a prophet would never be welcomed-
in his home town.
How many silk-cotton trees dey try to cut-down
To size,
Before dey realize, it only give time
for the roots to bend deeper,
They the keepers
of our story,
enforce realities that we choose to ignore,
and the store
-houses for black gold,
could only preserve this people
through folklore,
but Man has become false law
unto himself,
and this fossil of a memory
is all he is left
with,
Memory is a presence
only moulded by goldsmiths
But at the mercy of this-
Master artist’s hands,
Recall turns to revelations
of a backward dance,
feet turned around,
chancing itself with a blind-man’s
lead, this country never holds on
to the men that she needs,
but he would still concede to her wishes,
Ascending to her whims,
but his
are the lungs of her mountains,
El Tucuche sings the ballad of her longing,
Read the paintings on the walls,
all the inscriptions are flowering,
Following,
down from the quiet of her emerald waters,
Aripo remains humble
knowing that she has conquered-
The landscape of this island,
risen to the pride of its ritual,
A relic of our sanctity,
the fragments of a spiritual,
Believing that this vessel could restore hope back to life,
Knotted umbilical chords strumming the hymn of his birthright,
Giving us to write-in all the unfinished verses,
But when a genius becomes 70, it marks a climax of ages.

copyright 2008

Monday, May 4, 2009