Carnival

Every Carnival I get so homesick, the rhythms and the smell of fresh paint from the midnight robber's collection box, but is when I hear that Pan Kaiso I does realise how it wasnt my choice to leave Trini in the first place. I does ask myself - 'Why you lef' Trini boy?'. That Pan Kaiso is the soul of Carnival and so the soul of Trinidad. Lord Kitchener did know that. De Fosto know that. David Rudder know that or witness 'Dus' in dey face'. I leave and it was like being swept away in the torrent of a dream. Cast up in a net and sent, like we always leave our paradise for suffer in the cold of Europe and America, thinking life would be better in these winter wonderlands. Is only now, listening to calypso semi finals from Skinner Park I know how sweet Trini really is. Even with the gun crime and the kidnapping, home is home. Boil corn still hot and nuts man still chanting 'Fresh and S a l t ! And we shivering up in London, missing the mas again. Last year a say next year, this year a say next one. Trini calling me. I keep remembering how it feel like to know a country loves you. To know that you belong. Not nationalistic is just that these islands are elegiac, yes to live there rugged if you don't have coin and I have things to do here first, but that pan kaiso and that biscuit tin drum like it calling me home. So why did I leave? I left because everyone said I should. Because I saw frosty the snowman one xmas morn as a child and it held me, because I used to see skyscrapers on Kojack and Cannon and wonder ways, because my grandmother knew me and the old bull would have to lock horns one day. And it was what everyone was trying to do, to escape.

Baba Kamau

The baba, deep teacher, master poet with his black shoes and tam read all of Rights of Passage, in a voice that seduced sleep and a trance in us, in the darkness of the Purcell Room, and his eminent beard, and he neva make a mistake yet, not a sideways step, he stay firm on the rhythm and it beat like the same drumskin he rap out on the pulpit till we were lost in the travelling of souls and movement across waters and landscapes from the Guniea Coast to the rugged shores of Haiti, Trinidad, Barbados and onwards and backwards and how the hurricane rips through the body like a kites jagged tail and Kamau so humble and Kamau so loose limbed and agile with his spirit that when we embraced i felt the sofness of the flesh above his belt.

Sewe Wangala (A Kalenda)

- first part -


Sewe wangala bondye ba-mwen, woy
(God, hide the wanga[1] for me)


robber man don’t get me
don’t blow me out down
town
down shantytown
ravine
wey they beat silver fish
and wabeen[2]
on the riverbank
on the riverbank.

we come like ripe
guava when it season
full it ripe
and it drop like
a 12 gauge shot that shatt-
er the rain soaked wings
of our mountain gods


young blood seep up on the sea and float foam
where my brother reel
reel so reel that the paddle broke
and tumble down
cliff and stony crocus bound
with the snakeskin mask and the kid-
nap bush hid in Orinoco navel string
robber man don’t lock my neck round
Piarco
airport roundabout.


island
is my
in-
stance
geographical
silence of my innermost

hide
the
ma
gic
for
me

Robber boy don’t make mud clog the tracks I cross river bank
don’t sell my eyes for sand puppet teeth
don’t seed my seppy for ransom
don’t brug my neck with fisherman’s twine
don’t scope my ruse with barbed river time
don’t fix my suffer with jumbie symposium
don’t grief my root with rumours of wounds

comecomecome
le we pounce on wild quenk and gouti
make we shuffle in the jungles
of port
of spain
le we
lime

spic and span a comin
spic and span mama
hide the magic
form.
e.


______________________
[1] magical fighting stick of a stickfighter
[2] a small ravine fish