In The Poetry

Early Days Thinking Is Only So Much

I didn’t think I shouldn’t be hungry
I didn’t think of government
I didn’t blame my father’s husbandry
everything was just as it was

I didn’t think a bellyful
of nothing was nothing
I didn’t think I didn’t deserve nothing
when there was food
there was everything
and there was a lot I knew

I knew we should bow
to [...]

This poem is about my birth. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was at my birth – she gave me my name after her husband who had recently died in a sudden accident.

My Arrival

Showing the creature I landed
I slipped from my mother’s womb
flesh connected, laced in a blood-spatter.

My father waited with a bottle of rum.
The moon [...]

This poems is called ‘Rough Sketch Beginning’.

Rough Sketch Beginning

I came to sketch
my ideas for my picture

I saw the sun
a bearded saint in bliss
curled in a face of fire

I saw a mountain
all a thought
left standing there

I saw the sea
a place too dreadful
to be empty

I saw a river
a lover fitted in
a perfect slit

I saw woodland branches
the many [...]

Benediction

Thanks to the ear
that someone may hear

Thanks to seeing
that someone may see

Thanks to feeling
that someone may feel

Thanks to touch
that one may be touched

Thanks to flowering of white moon
and spreading shawl of black night
holding villages and cities together

This poem was almost a kind of confession when on one of the occasions I’d gone back to my village and a man who had grown much older – he was kind of going over his life to me – I had come back from England and the essence of what he was saying was [...]

This poem is an experience in London when I came from America (and went back home and stayed awhile and then I came to England) and I was living in Brixton at the time. The poem is called:

In-a Brixtan Markit

I walk in-a Brixtan markit,
believin I a respectable man,
you know. An wha happn?

Policeman come straight up
an [...]