a woman,
breath warm in light breeze,
her dark shadow skimming ripples –
island bound. You will neither see the fruit
in her lap, nor the seed in the fruit.
You will not hear the song
in her head. It is said
no man is an island, but perhaps
a woman is
because an island will bud,
will flower, will fruit – an island
knows the history-filled caress
of a bone-heavy sea, wet and clean
as glass; an island can hide rebels in its green,
can feed them bread as fruit and red flowers
as liquid; an island
can birth a man.
yorkshire bath displays
(or six ways of looking at a bath with dark brown legs walking the streets in northern England)
i – theft
The damn thing is stolen, he is
carrying it over his head
to evade cameras: cheeky lot,
these darkies, he’s using the overflow
hole for eyes.
ii – migration
See what people will do to avoid paying
for a taxi? That would be what? Fifteen
quid? These immigrants are just tight-
fisted. It’s ridiculous. ridiculous!
iii – africans
Africans! They can’t stop carrying things
on their heads if they try. Imagine
that! Lugging a bath across Leeds
on your head – remember that Yeboah fella?
He could strike a ball like a sledgehammer.
iv – theatre
It’s got to be one of those
new performance thingies. To see
people’s reactions, like. Didn’t you hear
about the one they did in a beetle? I am
surprised that little thing
didn’t fall apart.
v – truth
NIGHT: A yorkshire man steals
a moment away from the bed, where
his children sleep, to rediscover his wife
in the bath. Her immigrant hands clenched
tight, he adjusts his head to carry
the weight of her pleasure on his tongue.
The contortions of their play, the heft
of his Caribbean roots and the ink of her
Indian know/ledge, wobble the tub’s legs.
It falls to the ground, water sloshing
like the Aire on a windy day. Surprisingly
the children do not stir, do not wake.
vi – summary
DAY: Buying a new bath is easy, getting
a van on a bank holiday is tricky – and...
hailing a taxi while west/black has many stories;
hailing a taxi while carrying a white bath is
another.
The Furnace
When you spend your childhood bathing
with cold water, you learn – quick
as lime – that soap
is warm enough to hold
back the chill of night
caught in bound oxygen;
that although moving fast will help
it’s better to stay even,
let your body heat find equilibrium;
that the earth takes the full brunt
of the sun’s burning
so it can guerrilla through the veins
of the water system
to infuse your post-football shower
with unexpected joy;
that your father carries the fires
of all his disappointments
under the coal of his skin; that
your mother’s embrace is a furnace.
Inheritance
Sometimes I overhear the muted
susurations of worms bent as hooks
into leaf-rich mounds of soil, the plea
of voices not meant for my ears. It is
gossip calculated as a rocket’s purest
arc, promises slipped into the ears of lovers,
hackneyed phrases like you’re only as young as
you feel – and my mind drifts to you; how
all your life you cried like a baby, never
controlled, your face a network of creases
that mapped your pain. You were my father
and I learned to love you with your face wet.
This may be
a twisted way
of saying thanks
for teaching me that even a life of nights still
whispers the sun’s burn, that the fluid of one’s
tears do not make the body boneless: it takes
strength to show how you feel but not waver
in your resolve, knowing the hourglass of healing
never loses its sand. Seeing you cry as a boy freed me,
pulled me from the vortex enough times to outspin
an unremarkable life: I have walked from light
into the comforts of darkness – rebirth canals –
confident that a path will unfold, the way
one did after I held dark soil in my teenage hands
and cast it on the wood of your departure, the way
this poem begins
with the invisible
prompting of ghosts
and ends with the soft lines of a questing pen,
like the earth cycling with the turning of nematodes
silent as DNA
in the darkness beneath my feet.
11-Page Letter to (A)nyemi (A)kpa
for Kakaiku & Ma Rainey
i - signs
Blood of mine, it is said... it was... an uncle
said someone has to stay behind, to receive
the letters, to tell the story (though not at leave
to read), but we both know that’s a Brer ruse,
a cousin-saving con: you stayed to flatten yourself
into signposts pointing away from where we fled to.
Brown as tree bark, expression wooden, you burned;
loath to give me up, you flamed as my wings bent.
I became wind; you became smoke - I see your signature
before it rains. I pour libation for your sacrifice;
your children sprinkle from 40s for my disappearance.
ii - lizards
It was as old Tom Wilson said later, Anyemi,
safer among the alligators, the swamp’s embrace
making mist of my tracks, shapeshifting my glaze
into scales. It was a measure of my fever that I fled
one white man to fight alongside another, held loyal
for a cold, hard promise. It’s the price of the ticket,
the cost of return: a will folded as achingly as our bodies
when we were tallied and shipped here. When you’re ready
Omanfo, when we sit one day to the agreement of two lizards -
one orange-flecked, the other with an orange band, you’ll see:
I’ll tell you how my veins knew ice to a Nova Scotian degree
iii - passing
One freezing night, in a dream, a pair of antlers
threw shadows hard as jail bars, cut across a wasteland,
blurred my vision. When I awoke I was unsure if the twin
shapes stood for us, but there is a proverb I now know,
Manyo; two antelopes do not solely roam for companionship
- one eats, the other watches. You didn’t flinch at the crossroad,
i’naa nabi, your genius for metaphor already clear as mead -
you factorised the 3/5 skewed algebra of liberation down
to (me - white) (you + white); you chose the plus sign,
you would ghost-pass: if phantoms are white, death is free.
Your cousin got freedom. I haven’t stopped moving since.
iv - earth, wind, water
Your totems hum still in the shrines we nested
in trees before ill winds blew white sheets to anchor
cargoes of wood and breathing greed off our warm shores.
Did we guess, or did we know - to riddle our prayers
into the pores of the
