Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

Ruby and me stalking savannah  
Crab season with cutlass and sack like big folk. 
Hiding behind stones or clumps of bush 
Crabs locked knee-deep in mud mating 
And Ruby, seven years old feeling strange at the sex 
And me horrified to pick them up 
Plunge them into the darkness of bag. 
So all day we scout to catch the lonesome ones 
Who don’t mind cooking because they got no prospect 
Of family, and squelching through the mud, 
Cutlass clearing bush at our feet, 
We come home tired slow, weighed down with plenty 
Which Ma throw live into boiling pot piece-piece. 
Tonight we’ll have one big happy curry feed, 
We’ll test out who teeth and jaw strongest 
Who will grow up to be the biggest 
Or who will make most terrible cannibal. 
 
We leave behind a mess of bones and shell 
And come to England and America 
Where Ruby hustles in a New York tenement 
And me writing poetry at Cambridge, 
Death long catch Ma, the house boarded up 
Breeding wasps, woodlice in its dark-sack belly: 
I am afraid to walk through weed yard, 
Reach the door, prise open, look, 
In case the pot still bubbles magical 
On the fireside, and I see Ma 
Working a ladle, slow – 
Limbed, crustacean-old, alone, 
In case the woodsmoke and curry steam 
Burn my child-eye and make it cry.