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

(for Mar, d. 1985) 

Now that peasantry is in vogue, 

Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, 

People strain for the old folk’s fatal gobs 

Coughed up in grates North or North East 

‘Tween bouts o’ living dialect, 

It should be time to hymn your own wreck, 

Your house the source of ancient song: 

Dry coconut shells cackling in the fireside 

Smoking up our children’s eyes and lungs, 

Plantains spitting oil from a clay pot, 

Thick sugary black tea gulped down. 

The Calves hustle to suck, 

Bawling on their rope but are beaten back 

Until the cow is milked. 

Frantic children call to be fed. 

Roopram the Idiot goes to graze his father’s goats backdam 

Dreaming that the twig he chews so viciously in his mouth 

Is not a twig. 

In a winter of England’s scorn 

We huddle together memories, hoard them from 

The opulence of our masters. 

You were always back home, forever 

As canefield and whiplash, unchanging 

As the tombstones in the old Dutch plot 

Which the boys used for wickets playing ball. 

Over here Harilall who regularly dodged his duties at the 

   Marketstall 

To spin bowl for us in the style of Ramadhin 

And afterwards took his beatings from you heroically 

In the style of England losing 

Is now known as the local Paki 

Doing slow trade in his Balham cornershop. 

Is it because his heart is not in business 

But in the tumble of wickets long ago 

To the roar of wayward boys? 

Or is it because he spends too much time 

Being chirpy with his customers, greeting 

The Tight-wrapped pensioners stalking the snow 

With tropical smile, jolly small chat, credit? 

They like Harilall, these muted claws of Empire, 

They feel privileged by his grinning service, 

They hear steelband in his voice 

And the freeness of the sea. 

The sun beams from his teeth. 

Heaped up beside you Old Dabydeen 

Who on Albion Estate clean dawn 

Washed obsessively by the canal bank, 

Spread flowers on the snake-infested water, 

Fed the gods the food that Chandra cooked, 

Bathed his tongue of the creole 

Babbled by low-caste infected coolies. 

His Hindi chants terrorized the watertoads 

Flopping to the protection of bush. 

He called upon Lord Krishna to preserve 

The virginity of his daughters 

From the negroes, 

Prayed that the white man would honour 

The end-of-season bonus to Poonai 

The canecutter, his strong, only son: 

Chandra’s womb being cursed by deities 

Like the blasted land 

Unconquerable jungle or weed 

That dragged the might of years from a man. 

Chandra like a deaf-mute moved about the house 

To his command. 

A fearful bride barely come-of-age 

Year upon year swelling with female child.  

Guilt clenched her mouth 

Smothered by a cry of bursting apart: 

Wrapped hurriedly in a bundle of midwife’s cloth 

The burden was removed to her mother’s safekeeping. 

He stamped and cursed and beat until he turned old 

With the labour of chopping tree, minding cow, building fence 

And the expense of his daughters’ dowries. 

Dreaming of India 

He drank rum 

Till he dropped dead 

And was buried to the singing of Scottish Presbyterian hymns 

And a hell-fire sermon from a pop-eyed bawling catechist, 

By Poonai, lately baptised, like half the village. 

Ever so old, 

Dabydeen’s wife, 

Hobbling her way to fowl-pen, 

Cussing low, chewing her cud, and lapsed in dream, 

Sprinkling rice from her shrivelled hand. 

Ever so old and bountiful, 

Past where Dabydeen lazed in his mudgrave, 

Idle, as usual in the sun, 

Who would dip his hand in a bowl of dhall and rice –  

Nasty man, squelching and swallowing like a low-caste sow – 

The bitch dead now! 

The first boat chugged to the muddy port 

Of King George’s Town. Coolies come to rest 

In El Dorado,   

Their faces and best saris black with soot. 

The men smelt of saltwater mixed with rum. 

The odyssey was plank between river and land. 

Mere yards but months of plotting 

In the packed bowel of a white man’s boat 

The years of promise, years of expanse. 

At first the gleam of the green land and the white folk and the 

   Negroes, 

The earth streaked with colour like a toucan’s beak, 

Kiskidees flame across a fortunate sky, 

Canefields ripening in the sun 

Wait to be gathered in armfuls of gold. 

I have come back late and missed the funeral. 

You will understand the connections were difficult. 

Three airplanes boarded and many changes 

Of machines and landscapes like reincarnations 

To bring me to this library of graves, 

This small clearing of scrubland. 

There are no headstones, epitaphs, dates. 

The ancestors curl and dry to scrolls of parchment. 

They lie like texts 

Waiting to be written by the children 

For whom they hacked and ploughed and saved 

To send to faraway schools. 

Is foolishness fill your head. 

Me dead 

Dog-bone and dry-well 

Got no story to tell. 

Just how me born stupid is so me gone. 

Still we persist before the grave 

Seeking fables. 

We plunder for the maps of El Dorado 

To make bountiful our minds in an England 

Starved of gold. 

Albion village sleeps, hacked 

Out between bush and spiteful lip of river. 

Folk that know bone 

Fatten themselves on dreams 

For the survival of days. 

Mosquitoes sing at a nipple of blood. 

A green-eyed moon watches 

The rheumatic agony of houses crutched up on stilts 

Pecked about by huge beaks of wind, 

That bear the scars of ancient storms. 

Crappeau clear their throats in hideous serenade, 

Candleflies burst into suicidal flame. 

In a green night with promise of rain 

You die. 

We mark your memory in songs 

Fleshed in the emptiness of folk, 

Poems that scrape bowl and bone 

In English basements far from home, 

Or confess the lust of beasts  

In rare conceits 

To congregation of the educated 

Sipping wine, attentive between courses –  

See the applause fluttering from their fair hands 

Like so many messy table napkins.