The Lost Opus Returns

Incredibly, at one of the darkest periods of my life, I've found a copy of my manuscript of poems, The Enormous Night. I may not be at the level of the genius represented in this post but I try a thing, as we say here in Guyana. Over the next month, I will be posting some examples of my poetry for you my loyal readers, adoring fans and potential donors (say the Marketing Manager of a local telecommunications company to list a random example) to the worthy cause of printing Fictions.

The following poem was written a little after April of 2001 - I was twenty years old at the time and in "esta mayoría inválida de hombre" as it were, now coming to grips with the tragic divisions within our society. While I had aimed for contemplative and ironic, I see now that the angry young man that I was then (plus ce change et cetera) nevertheless came out. Enough preface, read:

A Journal

I
ee-hi ee-hi oh

nearing seventy, a library within
his brain, an old man comes to
us every Sunday morning at
breakfast, always with a half-page
full of his concerns, pleasures, fears
Doha, cricket, Hopkins' poems,
CXC grades, increasingly his own
mortality, underscored with age

sees what, more or less,
Hopkins saw, "a wilder beast from
West than all were, more
Rife in her wrongs, more lawless
And more lewd…"

but this place prisms everything,
even the sagest of views

partly his own skin, partly his age,
partly compassion that cages, quells
what often rightly should be rage

II
an atmosphere resembling what
they had read of war

Ireland, Palestine, Bosnia seemed
other worlds away, unreal images
beamed into our living room tv's

until the day this city erupted,
the sky over the Cathedral darkened,
shots fired, fires raged, raging,

tear-gassed people screamed
afterwards, who could recognise GT,
phoenix-born of ashes, charred as cane-fields?

until that day, we had been weaned on illusions
until that day, we had lived behind screens


III
here in the country of the old

there is a tree

something, a spark
something small, less
than a bolt of lightning
touches it

the leaves burn last
condemned to
this tree, they burn

though the deadwood
always ignites first

IV
love in the time of cholera

temporal anagram:
a 26 year old woman
in a 62 year old house

preferring the patronymic, "Harry"

Harry of the long wet nights
(after the tv had been turned off
and the looting and the fires
in the news discussed)
nights of liquid
bodies writhing
hands clasping
salt-sweat nights
a palm hot with
suppressing screams
the singular, fluid
brushstroke nights

and mornings came, Harry
daylight, a pastiche of matrimonial scenes
an eclectic pseudo-conjugal montage
fluffing our pillows, folding sheets,
helping your daughter with
homework, reading Stabroek News
while you with one hand unhooked
your bra, cooking chicken and potatoes,
sorting laundry, washing wares,
the neighbour's child sent for
three half-litre bottles of Coke

within those most mundane of acts
a young poet sought his epiphanies
a young man tested domesticity

V
I repeat it here, feeling a waste of life

this place lost
its poetry too early
replaced it with the
pyromania of political will

we have had no heroes
no great men
not the poet fading
whose heart's hill of fire
unglowed like a coal
not the bending, mindless
backwater dentist
not the slain
intellectual animal
in his communist cage
not the bauxite-republic
Napoleon on his
alluvial throne

the most there has been
are the third-rate vultures
carrion kings of this
political wasteland
third-world, spoon-tongued,
anencephallic demigogues,
stirring up storms in the tiny,
tinnin-cup collective
mind of the masses

and there has been
no one to ask
none strong enough
to ask aloud what
needs most asking

if these days are the calm,
then before what storm?

or, if these days are the storm,
then before what calm?