“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.

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

ImageChef.com

Performance piece- Caroni (1975) Ltd.

A silent mob of shadows,
slicing the dew of ah early morning haze,
grazing against fragile moments,
a savannah now laid waste in atonement-
for our skins and theirs,
for hours ah skimmed-
through history books with tired spines,
and still they couldn’t hold the truth I had set out to find,
but they can’t withhold my story from me,
for I was born the-
descendant of a woman of the cane fields,
and like medicine, the vaporized scent of it heals,
and fills meh empty spaces filling up,
Caroni could cup- my destiny in her veined hands,
in every riverbed encircling sunburnt grasslands,
that would harvest and invoke some memory that ah had inherited-
with a scented freshness for a Saturday at dawn,
a violet robe that nature put on,
bambooing itself through the grass,
and so too would cane also come to pass.
But this central wind have a rhapsody,
and these purple stalks trap a certain melody of brustles,
but in a violent twang that we never understood too well,
and to tell of it almost taboo to a westernized tongue,
but to the rhythm of a drumerless drum,
I could translate time into being a relevant reality-
and the sweetened tragedy stood as a smoke-screen to filter out tobacco,
die-versify de trade,
and to see the face of a people fade
between crops,
Taino to Kalinago to Amerindian to what
crocheted my conscience to these fields,
to Africa where they would steal
labourers to work for the life of sugar,
cutlassing through the feelings of a disconnected granddaughter,
but remembering to mehself that blood thicker than water
would ever be,
in dreams I would see the plantations all being set on fire,
ravaging a landscape, a colonial empire,
sending the warning up and over the hills-
Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico until-
even my Trinidad coloured and starched a night sky in red,
see, these cane fields bled-
the voice of a voiceless people,
in harvest, in war, in rebellion, in the dance of a festival-
and to the bajhans and mantras of east-indian labourers,
20,000 falling unemployed one day because-
of the crossed priorities of a rum republic.
So we subject-
these promised lands to breathe a different air about us
that come like a cursed memory verse
to mock any advancements we might make,
either now, or later.
But we have made an-
uncertain step carved by anxious feet in Caroni’s soil,
too fertile to care about these anticipated spoils,
the children of the cane,
and again the familiar episode of the innocence of a child
ruptures and cuts this country straight down the middle,
see
because- Sean Luke was only 5 years old
and only if these fields could talk then
they would silence the world,
but they would never speak
because our ears not ready to hear their story,
and so a battered king sugar descends from his glory,
never to raise his head to a red sky
again.

Copyright © 2008

Commemoration of the trans-atlantic slave trade 2009 March 25th

There is much more of him in me than a borrowed rib and a promise,
Caged into the faintness of fading saneness,
They really thought they framed this boat
from the surrendering of black hands and black faces,
But there is a more deadly Atlantic gouging itself out from under my eyelids,
There is a more fatal venom on my hands than the fluids of every induced miscarriage,
And there is nothing symbolic in the rites of this middle passage
where only a ghostwriter will be left to tell the story of my lineage and I,
North east trade winds soothe the outcry from
dangling spirits in silk trees and shipwrecks
and white-sheets on infidels’ beds made from cedar
and in the glance of every face reflecting part of West Africa,-
the temper of a black woman is not to be provoked into vengeance,
yuh never bite the hand that feeds you, your mistress or your children,
you should know better than to separate her from love..
so you will live each day to swallow the bitterness of
backyard aloes brewed with resentment,
flavoured by revolting taste of his absence,
until her very essence is enough to choke your conscience into breathing on its own.
This is where we have built our homes
On beachfronts and old ship docks with folding sand,
Building dreams and castles we somehow expect to remain standing-
Carving notches in each others flesh, to check time and so making
wounds without notice,
spending 400 years apart from you could have never made us so hopeless
that we cannot remember each other anymore.

copyright 2009

meaning.

Love is not selfish
And I have long returned you to your freedoms,
Releasing you from any restriction,
And I have let you go,
not wishing your return.
I learn in the most unlikely of places
pledging in the sincerest of promises,
That I am only happy she has found you.
Because I have found him.
So this is the morning I breathe better,
The Zahir is laid to rest
And I am three steps closer to my
Destiny not of this soil.
Maktub.

wha it is he jus say..?

You don’t have what it takes to burst life seeds from cotton fibres in your stomach, your womb was not created to hold in the rivers of the tears of continental Africans, nor house the heartbeat of nations marching in your blood, your fluids were never meant to flood the passages of any element more than oxygen, you were never the instrument of creation that God planted life in, so spin this water-wheel to nourish the river, damaging everything from maiden to mother-giver, from laden tree to new-born delivered, where the only thing that would suckle you are leeches that consider your flesh a feast in their fix of an ego to leak their eagle-type pride from. Life does not derive from you and you should stay quietly in your place, assuming you remember where that is.

I promise I am not a man-hater...just that some things inspire me more than others...