Providential. Colin Channer

and over again.

      Maybe where you go

      to be a civilize

      and not no cunumunu,

      as Miss Lady styled him

      when she dressed him down

      for reading out her paper,

      eye-raping her neck-back.

      But it’s an error that I live off,

      this man-boy’s misread,

      a blunder he compounded

      as he clambered into

      walks of guavas, figs

      and pomegranates,

      fruits with no owner,

      taking steeper slopes

      toward the ridge his kin

      had come to after

      getting their free paper,

      dug their yam hills,

      planted roots.

      A better reader

      would have gotten

      hired by the Royal Mail.

      But which colonial system

      could afford to waste a fellow

      like granddad:

      obedient, simple-minded,

      burly, color struck.

      They couldn’t trust him

      with an envelope. They

      issued him a gun.

       OCCUPATION

       (for Klive Walker)

      When he says he signed up out of Christian duty,

      there’s a twitch in the lid of his dead glass eye,

      a flash perhaps of what had worried him

      when independence came in ’62.

      Working-class, dark, and ambitious,

      but scarred in ways he didn’t know,

      he saw the new country as a Canaan,

      land of sweet promise with a flag, an anthem,

      and not to be discounted, the ska,

      clean pop played by qualified sheet readers,

      black men from humble backgrounds

      dressed in loafers, ties and suits,

      the melodies so near exactly like the jazz

      arrangers borrowed,

      the solos rich with Cuban licks,

      the very setup so orchestral, seating in rows,

      classy negroes, black but modern,

      separating us and them—the conga-beating

      natives of the world.

      He says, once he heard the Rasta drumming

      underneath Oh Carolina mongrelizing

      with the pop he got urgent. Signed up.

      The old campaigner finger calls another Appleton,

      bites air before the sip, blows out after gulping.

      Ahhhhhhhhhh. Fire out and in. Gets quiet.

      Blinks his good eye plenty, while the dead one

      goes adrift as he begins to boast of cordons,

      raids, all-out assaults. Pinnacle. Coral Gardens,

      Back-O-Wall. Machetes confiscated,

      all the caches of illegal books,

      and people, strange people, like the dread

      who’d rather have his elbow broken than to leggo

      off his ital pot. By then the rum

      had soaked his tongue enough to slow it,

      change its pace, grace it with cadence

      of requiem.