woods lush with bamboo,
and fat white cows.
It rained for days he told her,
like Bible,
and the whole place smelled of war,
and ’cause everything was broke up
they slept for days in mud
until, thanks be to God, sunshine came back slowly,
and things took time to dry out, and life—
well, it went back to normal,
to duties and habits,
same difference, old usual,
scratching dirt, doing what you do
as ’cording to what season,
planting, reaping—
if busha don’t need you—maybe little school.
That’s how it was—
you worked as you should,
kept your mind on now,
left behind whatever happened—
as they learned you
with the switch from early—
what to keep, and what to talk.
And so it was. Forgotten.
There, but as a dust of disquiet,
a fog of unease until that first Easter
after martial law when he and Neville,
same Inspector Bledsoe in the photo,
sneaked away to idle,
hunt birds and play cricket in a clearing
near some cedar woods
and corpses started poking from the ground.
From that day,
he told his great-grandchild,
he could see things, cross over and come back,
and that’s how he earned a shilling—
selling conference with the dead,
finding well water,
susu-ing what to seed in what season,
when drought would come.
For those he loved
he drew tonics, brewed infusions,
stood as surety for loans,
sat on his porch in Gibraltar,
gave advice in his hat and jacket,
healed with tea and words,
patient with the lines,
sloe eyes blankish,
then took to bed with john crow batty,
crude white rum, sometimes two bottles,
and think and think and think about the killings,
drift to the slaughter
and the what came next,
the digging, the heaving, the
hiding with dirt,
but most of all how quickly
he and Neville took to acting normal,
went back to simple pickney life.
NEVILLE’S LOGIC
He’d been there with the rest
on garbage duty, cleaning up,
chucking bodies into graves,
sweat for eye water,
free born, speaking English,
no clan or tribal language,
no lash markings on the shoulders,
no embossing on the back,
just a skin, a color, a future
with set duties, some roles:
pickininny to whites,
livestock with language,
to blacks—recruit to toughen
up for backra work.
Jamaica? Their country—
Jamaican? Near white
mustee mulatto quadroon
Nation?
Something more than land
where you is born,
which busha, which estate,
which district near which town?
Until he sees
courthouse square, St. Thomas,
negro, statue with a breath,
helmet, tunic, face fed
well, no whiskers,
belonging
Jamaica Something Force.
Place, rank and country.
Own it. Pass it on.
CLAN
(for Kwame Dawes)
Every clan has its colors, its history, its foes,
its limits, its ways of notching who’s out and in.
Every clan has its parlance, its secrets, its publics,
its fables, its side deals cut with death.
These old street gangs of Kingston,
city ghillies, croton orange, chocho green,
are not manics, but shrewd evaluators
of their worth: shooters part-making an epic,
a story kept in breath, refreshed
at corner fetes of chicken, smoky bread,
at fish spots on the dark foreshore,
waves translating patwa to a lost Aegean tongue.
Hail, Spanglers, Shower,
Byah, Copper, Starkey, Bucky.
Hail, Claudie, Zacky, Rhygin,
Feather Mop.
Every clan has its children, its widows,
its fathers, its prayers, its vengeance pledge,
its poems, its dances, its pictures,
its questions never set.
Who gave the order? When will it end?
Every clan has peaks it never gets to,
humps to get over, mounds of buried hurt.
We belongers sieve the fragments
from the midden, make molds.
Shells. Shit. Skin. Seeds. Bone.
MIMIC
I.
From the chopper shot
the beach