Saturday, November 3, 2012

CARIBBEAN NOIR

(Living in the past,
we are living in the past
cause the past is not yet past.)

Welcome to a paradise
that never was
true, except for the privileged few.
Hammock of knitted knots
and rocks strung
between the old world and the new.

Chain of islands, coves and caves,
once haunt
of buccaneers and pirates,
now haunted
by restless duppies
of Morgan and Blackbeard.
No nine night, forty night,
hundred night rite
will appease curse,
the spirits
of the damned.
No longer spawning wars,
your grimoires, now
daily horror
stories of mindless
murders,
grim noirs
in the ghettos
and shanty towns
of Kingston,
Georgetown,
Port-au-Prince,
Port of Spain.
Survivors
coexisting with the lions
and the roaches.

Echoes of duende, perched
proudly, black-
plumaged cockatoo
on shoulders
of Cristobal Colon
and his wretched lot of seamen.

Echoes of duende, Las Casas,
like a black
plague, ravaged
and decimated
house
of Hyarima.

Echoes of duende, corbeaus
disguised
as seabirds,
raucous, discordant
song, circled, hovered, black
cloud, over the Zong.

Echoes of duende, Nanny
Maroon and Cudjoe,
black
resistance,
freedom fighters,
from plantation, grave-dirt,
tilled and toiled
in seeping
blood, escaping
to limestone hills
and caves and gorges.

Vodun,
beat the silent, spirit
drum
for Toussaint, Christophe
and Dessalines.
Insatiable thunder
of hurricane,
earthquake,
Shango.
Soufriere bowels
erupting,
belching, sulphuric fury
and sound
of a thousand giant conch shells.

Caribbean, my Caribbean,
your cradle was my casket,
oh Atlantis,
your swizzled sea
my Atlantic catacomb.
Bottomless black
basket of unburied
woes and bodies flung,
like fodder, to the sharks
and shadows.

Oh that a cup of lemon
grass could cure
this roasting
fever, scourge of scurvy,
in your Jolly
Roger bones.

(Living in the past,
we are living in the past
cause the past is not yet past.)

©2012 by G. Newton V. Chance
               


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George Newton Vivian Chance (Trinidad and Tobago) -- member of the Poet Society of Trinidad and Tobago, http://poetssocietytt.blogspot.com/ and the World Poets Society, http://world-poets.blogspot.com/ -- born in Tobago on 3rd March 1957. While residing at Rio Claro was inspired to write over a hundred poems at the turn of the Millennium. Hobbies include playing wind instruments, building computers, observing nature, reading and writing poetry. Believes that the power of a song is in its ability to evoke emotions by the marriage of lyric and music but that music without lyric can be just as powerful, that lyric without music can also be just as powerful, that there is music in the lyric and that lyric can be simple yet profound. Also, in this the age of computers, would like to model his lines after simple and efficient code and, analogous to Object Oriented Programming, achieve most of his imagery from nouns and verbs, avoiding the bloat and excess of unnecessary adjectives. This is what he aspires to attain in his poetry.

I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older
than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn
all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

by Langston Hughes

the poet writes the poem;
the reader gives it life
(© G. Newton V. Chance)
Make somebody happy (© Alexander Ligertwood & Carlos Santana)

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