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NATURE

A Lesson for this Sunday

With its frail kites of furious butterflies

Requests the lemonade of simple praise

In scansion gentler than my hammock swings

And rituals no more upsetting than a

Black maid shaking linen as she sings

The plain notes of some protestant hosanna

Since I lie idling from the thought in things,

Or so they should. Until I hear the cries

Of two small children hunting yellow wings,

Who break my sabbath with the thought of sin.

Brother and sister, with a common pin,

Frowning like serious lepidopterists.

The little surgeon pierces the thin eyes.

Crouched on plump haunches, as a mantis prays

She shrieks is eviscerate its abdomen.

The lesson is the same. The maid removes

Both prodigies from their interest in science.

The girl, in lemon frock, begins to scream

As the maimed, teetering things attempts its flight.

She is herself a thing of summery light.

Frail as a flower in this blue August air,

Not marked for some late grief that cannot speak.

The mind swings inward on itself in fear

Swayed towards nausea from each normal sign.

Heredity of cruelty everywhere,

And everywhere the frocks of summer torn,

The long look back to see where choice is born,

As summer grass sways to the scythe’ design.

Derek Walcott

Birdshooting Season
Birdshooting season the men

Make marriages with their guns

My father’s house turns macho

As from far the hunters gather

All night long contentless women

Stir their brews: hot coffee

Chocolate, cerassie

Wrap pone and tie-leaf

For tomorrow’s sport. Tonight

The men drink white rum neat.

In darkness shouldering

Their packs, their guns, they leave

We stand quietly on the

Doorstep shivering. Little boys

Longing to grow up bird hunters too

Little girls whispering.

Fly Birds Fly.

Oliver Senior

An African Thunderstorm
From the west

Clouds come hurrying with the wind

Turning

Sharply

Here and there

Like a plague of locusts

Whirling

Tossing up things on its tail

Like a madman chasing nothing.

Pregnant clouds

Rude stately on its back

Gathering to perch on hills

Like dark sinister wings;

The Wind whistles by

And trees bend to let it pass.

In the village

Screams of delighted children

Toss and turn

In the din of the whirling wind

Women-

Babies clinging on their back-

Dart about
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In and out

Madly

The Wind whirls by

Whilst trees bend to let it pass

Clothes wave like tattered flags

Flying off

To expose dangling breasts

As daggered blinding flashes

Rumble, tremble, and crack

Amidst the smell of fired smoke

And the pelting march of the storm

David Rubadiri

Landscape Painter
(for Albert Huie)

I watch him set up easel,

Both straddling precariously

A corner of the twisted, climbing

Mountain track

A tireless humming- bird, his brush

Dips, darts, hovers now here, now there,

Where puddles of pigment

Bloom in the palette’s wild small garden.

The mountains pose for him

In a family group
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Dignified, self- conscious, against the wide blue screen

Of morning, low green foot- hills

Sprawl like grandchildren about the knees

Of seated elders. And behind them, aloof,

Shouldering the sky, patriarchal in serenity,

And the professional gaze

Studies positions, impatiently waiting

For the perfect moment to fix

Their preparedness to confine them

For the pleasant formality

Of the family album.

His brush a humming bird

Meticulously poised …

The little hills fidgeting

Changelessly changing,

Artlessly frustrating

The painter’s art

Vivian Virtue

CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES

My Parents
My parents kept me from children who were rough
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Who threw words like stones and who worn torn clothes.

Their thighs showed through rags. They ran in the street

And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron

Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms.

I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys

Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

They were lithe, they sprang out behind hedges

Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud

While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.

I longed to forgive them, but they never smiled

Stephen Spender

Little Boy Crying

Your mouth contorting in brief spite and hurt,

Your laughing metamorphosed into howls,

Your frame so recently relaxed now tight

With three year old frustration, your bright eyes

Swimming tears, splashing your bare feet,

You stand there angling for a moments hint

Of guilt or sorrow for the quick slap struck.

The ogre towers above you, that grim giant,

Empty of feeling, a colossal cruel,

Soon victim od the tale’s conclusion, dead

At last. You hate him, you imagine

Chopping clean the tree he’s scrambling down

Or plotting deeper pits to trap him in.

You cannot understand, not yet,

That hurt your easy tears can scald him with,

Nor guess the wavering hidden behind that mask.

This fierce man longs to lift you, curb your sadness

With piggy- back or bull fight, anything,

But dare not ruin the lessons you should learn.

You must not make a plaything for the rain.

Mervyn Morris

Once upon a time

Once upon a time, son

They used to laugh with their hearts

And laugh with their eyes;

But now they only laugh with their teeth,

While their ice-block-cold eyes

Search behind my shadow.

There was a time indeed

They used to shake hands with their hearts;

But that’s gone son.

Now they shake hands without hearts

While their left hands search

My empty pockets.

‘Feel at home!’ ‘Come again’;

They say, and when I come

Again and feel

At home, once, twice,

There will be no thrice-

For then I find doors shut on me.

So I have learned many things, son.

I have learned to wear many faces

Like dresses- homeface,

Officeface, streetface, hostface,

Cocktailface, with all their conforming smiles

Like a fixed portrait smile.

And I have learned too,

To laugh with only my teeth

And shake hands without my heart.

I have also learned to say, ‘ Goodbye,’

When I mean ‘Good- riddance’;

To say ‘ Glad to meet you’,

Without being glad; and say ‘It’s been

Nice talking to you,’ after being bored.

But believe me, son

I want to be what I used to be

When I was like you. I want

To unlearn all these muting things.

Most of all, I want to relearn

How to laugh, for my laugh in the mirror

Shows only my teeth like a snake’s bare fangs!

So show me, son,

How to laugh; show me how

I used to laugh and smile

Once upon a time when I was like you

Gabriel Okara

PLACES
West Indies, U.S.A

Cruising at thirty thousand feet above the endless green

The islands seem like dice tossed on a casino’s baize,

Some come up lucky, other not. Puerto Rico takes the pot,

The Dallas of the West Indies, silver linings on the clouds

As we descend are hall- marked, San Juan glitters

Like a maverick’s gold ring.

All across the Caribbean

We’d collected terminals- airports are like calling cards,

Cultural fingermarks; the hand written signs a Port-

Au-Prince, Piarco’s sleazy tourist art, the lethargic

Contempt of the baggage boys at ‘Vere Bird’ in St Johns…

And now for plush San Juan.

But the pilot’s bland,

You’re safe in my hands drawls crackles as we land,

‘US regulations demand all passengers not disembarking

At San Juan stay on the plan, I repeat, stay on the plane.’

Subtle Uncle Sam, afraid too many desperate blacks

Might re-enslave this Island of the free

Might jump the barbed

Electric fence around ‘America’s’

Back yard’ and claim that vaunted sanctuary…’give me your poor..’

Through toughened, tinted glass the contrasts tantalise;

US patrol cars glide across the shimmering tarmac,

Containered baggage trucks unload with fierce efficiency.

So soon we’re climbing,

Low above the pulsing city streets;

Galvanized shanties overseen by condominiums

Polished Cadillacs shimmying past Rastas with pushcarts

And as we climb, San Juan’s fools- glitter calls to mind

The shattered innards of a TV set that’s fallen

Off the back of a lorry, all painted valves and circuits

The roads like twisted wires,

The bright cars, microchips.

It’s sharp and jagged and dangerous, and belonged to someone else.

Stewart Brown

Sonnet Composed upon Westminister Bridge,

September 3, 1803
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Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty;

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

That river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsmith

The Woman who speaks to the man who has employed her son.

Her son was first made known to her

As a sense of unease, a need to cry

For little reasons and a metallic tide

Rising in her mouth each morning

Such signs made her know

That she was not alone in her body

She carried him full term

Tight up under her heart

She carried him like the poor

Carry hope, hope you get a break

Or a visa, hope one child go through

And remember you. He had no father.

The man she made him with had more

Like him, he was fair minded

He treated all his children

With equal and unbiased indifference

She raised him twice, one as a mother

Then as father, set no ceiling

On what he could be doctor,

Earth healer, pilot take wings.

But now he tells her he is working

For you that you value him so much

You give him one whole submachine gun

For him aline.

He says you are a like father to him

She is wondering hat kind of father

Would give a son hot and exploding

Death, when he asks him for bread,

She went downtown and bought three

And one third yards of black cloth

And a deep crowed and veiled hat

For the day he draw his bloody salary

She has no power over you and this

At the level of earth, what she has

Are prayers and a mother’s tears

And at knee city she used them.

She says psalms for him

She reads psalms for you

She weeps for his soul

Her eye water covers you.

She is throwing a partner

With Judas Iscariot’s mother

The thief on the left hand side

Of the cross, his mother

Is the banker, her draw though

Is first and last for she still

Throwing two hands as mother and father.

She is prepared, she is done. Absalom.

Lorna Goodison

It is the Constant Image of your Face

It is the constant image of your face

Framed in my hands as you knelt before my chair

The grave attention of your eyes

Surveying me amid my world of knives

That stays with me, perennially accuses

And convicts me of heart’s treachery;

And neither you nor I can plead excuses

For you, you know, can claim no loyalty –

My land takes precedence of all my loves.

Yet I beg mitigation, pleading guilty

For you, my dear, accomplice of my heart

Made, without words, such blackmail with your beauty

And proffered me such dear protectiveness

That I confess without remorse or shame

My still- fresh treason to my country

And hope that she, my other, dearest love

Will pardon freely, not attaching blame

Being your mistress or your match) in tenderness.

Dennis Brutus

A Stone’s Throw

We shouted out

‘We’ve got her! Here she is

It’s her all right.’

We caught her.

There she was-

A decent- looking woman, you’d have said,

(They often are)

Beautiful, but dead scared

Tousled- we roughed her up

A little, nothing much

And not the first time

By any means

She’s felt men’s hands

Greedy over her body-

But ours were virtuous,

Of course.

And if our fingers bruised

Her shuddering skin,

These were love- bites, compared

To the hail of kisses of stone,

The last assault

And battery, frigid rape

Of right

For justice must be done

Specially when

It tastes so good

And then- this guru

Preacher, God- merchant, God- knows-what-

Spoilt the whole thing,

Speaking to her

(Should never speak to them)

Squatting on the ground- her level,

Writing in the dust

Something we couldn’t read

And saw in her

Something we couldn’t see

At least until

He turned his eyes on us,

Her eyes on us,

Our eyes upon ourselves.

We walked away

Still holding stones

That we may throw

Another day

Given the urge.

Elna Mitchell

Test Match Sabrina Park

Proudly wearing the rosette of my skin

I strut into Sabina

England boycotting excitement bravely,

Something badly amiss.

Cricket. Not the game they play at Lords,

The crowd- whoever saw a crowd

At a cricket match?- are caged

Vociferous partisans, quick to take offence.

England sixty eight for none at lunch.

‘What sort o batting dat man?

Dem kaan play cricket again,

Praps dem should- a borrow Lawerence Rowe

And on it goes, the wiket slow

As the batting and the crowd restless.

‘Eh white bwoy, how you brudders dem

Does sen we sleep so? Me a pay monies

Fe watch dis foolishness? Cho!’

So I try to explain in my Hampshire drawl

About the condition in Kent,

About sticky wickets and muggy days

And the monsoon season in Manchester

But fail to convince even myself.

The crowd’s loud’s busing drives me out

Skulking behind a tarnished rosette

Somewhat frayed now but unable, quite,

To conceal a blushing nationality.

Stewart Brown

Dreaming Black Boy

I wish my teacher’s eyes wouldn’t

Go past me today. Wish he’d know

It’s okay to hug me when I kick

A goal. Wish I wouldn’t

Hold back when an answer comes

I’m no woodchopper now

Like all ancestors.

I wish I could be educated

To the best of tune up, and earn

Good money and not sink to lick

Boots. I wish I could go on every

Crisscross way of the globe

And no persons or powers or

Hotel keepers would make it a waste

I wish life wouldn’t spend me out

Opposing. Wish same way creation

Would have me stand it would have

Me stretch, and hold high, my voice

Paul Robeson’s my inside eye

A sun. Nobody’s wants to say

Hello to nasty answers

I wish torch throwers of night

Would burn lights for decent times.

Wish plotters in pyjamas would pray

For themselves. Wish people wouldn’t

Talk as if I dropped from Mars.

I wish only boys were scared

Behind bravados, for I could suffer.

I could suffer a big big lot.

I wish nobody would to earn

The terrible burden I can suffer

James Berry

This is the Dark Time, My Love

This is the Dark Time, My Love

All round the land brown beetles crawl about.

The shining sun is hidden in the sky.

Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.

This is the dark time, my lover

It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.

It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.

Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

Who comes walking in the dark night time?

Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?

It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader

Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.

Martin Carter

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double like old beggars under sacks,

Knock- kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men matched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five- nines that dropped behind.

GAS! GAS! Quick boys! An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth- corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love and dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful-

The eye of a little god, four cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

The she turns to those liars, the candles of the moon.

I see her back and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitating of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises towards her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Slyvia Plath

Ol’ Higue
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You think I like this stupidness

Gallivanting all night without skin,

Burning myself out like cane- fire

To frighten the foolish?

And for what? A few drops of baby blood?

You think I wouldn’t rather

Take my blood seasoned in fat

Black pudding, like everyone else?

And don’t even talk ‘bout the pain of salt

And having to bend those old bones down

To count a thousand grains of rice!

If only babies didn’t smell so nice!

And if I could only stop

Hearing the soft, soft call

Of that pure blood running in new veins,

Singing the sweet song of life

Tempting an old, dry- up woman who been

Holding her final note for years and years,

Afraid of the dying hum…

The again, if I didn’t fly and come

To that fresh pulse in the middle of the night,

How would you, mother,

Name your ancient dread?

And who to blame

For the murder inside your head….?

Believe me-

as long as it have women giving birth

a poor ol’ higue like me can never dead.

Mark Mc Watt

South

But today I recapture the islands’

Bright beaches: blue mist from the ocean

Rolling into the fishermen’s houses.

By these shores I was born: sound of the sea

Came in at my window, life heaved and breathed in me then

With the strength of that turbulent soil.

Since then I have travelled: moved far from those beaches:

Sojourned in stoniest cities, walking the lands of the north

In sharp slanting sleet and hail,

Crossed countless saltless savannas and come

To this house in the forest where the shadows oppress me

And the only water is rain and tepid taste of the river.

We wo are born of the ocean can never eek solace

In rivers: their flowing runs on like our longing,

Reproves us our lack of endeavour and purpose,

Proves that our striving will founder on that.

We resent them this wisdom, this freedom: passing us

Toiling, waiting and watching their cunning declension down to the sea.
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But today I would join you, travelling river,

Borne down the years of your patientest flowing,

Past pains that would wreck us, the sorrows arrest us

Hatred that washes us up on the flats;

And moving on thought the plains that receive us

Processioned in tumult, come to sea.

Bright waves splash up from the rocks to refresh us,

Blue sea shells shift in their wake

And there is the thatch of the fishermen’s houses, the path

Made of pebbles, and look!

Small urchins combing the beaches

Look up from their to salute us:

They remember us just as we left them.

The fishermen hawking the surf on this side

Of the reef stands up in his boat

And halloos us, as starfish lies in its pool.

And gulls, while slanted seaward,

Fly into the limitless morning before us.

Kamau Brathwaite.

Death, be not proud

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so:

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor death; nor yet canst thou kill me

From rest and sleep, which but they pictures be,

Much pleasure, then from thee much more must flow;

And soonest our best men with thee do go –

Rest of their bones and soul’s delivery!

Thou’rt slave to fate, chance, kings and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell;

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke. Why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more. Death, thou shalt die!

John Donne