RUBBLE

Come, let me show you ruins

Of dogmas, philosophies, ideologies, mythologies, religions,

Rubble of lives, edifices, nations, empires built on

Classic lines and blatant falsehoods.

Come, I will show you ruins of neighborhoods,

Kingdoms, monuments to ambition and immense pride,

Rode unbridled, without reins, of monarchs and their reigns.

Coliseums and Parthenons crumble,

Fade to dust like old daguerreotypes

In mighty Aton's intense glint and glare.

Societies stutter, stumble, fall

prey to Chronos' depredations and timelines.

They that stood tall, standing on the toes

Of Timbuktu, like Timbuktu, are gone

The way of all flesh and bone and stone.

©2012 by G. Newton V. Chance

VOICES

Once, I swear, I heard voices
inside the buttressed tree-trunk of a mora tree
in a mora forest at Guayaguayare.

Sound as of a radio rooted
in sacred ground of forest floor.

Was it the tree-trunk talking,
playback of conversations taped,
in a long forgotten

language of a long forgotten
Taino chief or shaman?

Once a mora tree spoke,
in soliloquy, its mad monologue to me
in a mora forest at Guayaguayare.

Sadly, I was too shaken, too taken
aback to try to translate or conversate.

©2012 by G. Newton V. Chance

PLASMA

(Rivers
sold in
plastic bottles
thrown in
rivers).

Earth
tears,
fragments
meandering
through suffocated cities
into seas of men-
dacities.

Earth tears,
fragmented,
lament after lament,
contiguous cries
of continents and countries,
and centuries.
Miscegenated cultures

whose children, mulattoes and douglas,
are cut flowers, flowers cut
from wild chaconias,
red rose of the mountains, plucked
and planted, and transplanted,
in blood-
filled bowls of morning-
mosquitoes.

Whose children would believe
that the hug of hags
and twilight bats
were nothing but their dreams,
and nightmares, except for the hickeys
of a socouyant on their necks,
arms, legs, backs, bellies
and exposed breasts.

(But even that soon fades away,
leaves only inner scars that all can see
except the scarred).

Whose children are mountain doves
battering heads bloody against gorilla-
glass ceilings and one-way walls.

Wings beat forever in amber;
petrified butterflies in a distant,
denuded garden
of bachac ants
and Liliputans
more afraid of Lilith
than of God.

And the priest, the priest in purple,
sanguine splendour,
is a praying man-
tis, preying man
this, who prays
the prayer of predator
and prey.

Meanwhile, fallen stars
clutch at drowning straws
of pyramids and sphinxes,

Sisyphus still draws water,
from new wells
and old polluted rivers,
earth's raw wounds,
and the doctor still bleeds,
draws blood from all,
draws lifeblood
from the well, the not so well and the unwell.

©2012 by G. Newton V. Chance

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