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Were you to meet, what would you say? Between your birthdays more than a hundred years Five generations, and the Atlantic Ocean Between her Guyana and your England
Would you call her Mother, like we all did Rushing to meet her over the bridge The donkey cart waiting as she paid the driver Four grand-daughters ecstatic at her arrival?
Would she have travelled down from the Corentyne Or sailed upriver from Kwakwani Would she have brought her parrot, her Polly Or naughty Jack, the capuchin monkey?
I can see you now scrambling for her lap With your Bob the Builder truck and your Scooby-Doo top And you’d chatter about Shrek and your new DVD And your Game Boy and what’s on the telly
And she’d stroke your blond hair, admire Your blue eyes, say was a blessing a St Valentine’s child A boy child, after all these girls, but who Was Scooby-Doo and what was telly?
And she might ask you who you were named for, St Kieren? And how she was so proud your Mummy name Eloise Like your great-granny name Eloise and did you know Her name, Brazh, was Portuguese?
Her family come from Madeira, you know You think is co-incidence the two of y’all Share the same birthday? And she’d press A gold piece in your hand and say
No matter how big the world, how wide the sea No matter was even a thousand years Family was family, Happy Birthday Valentine Boy.
An ode to Broadstairs Folk Week
Anansi hit Broadstairs running all eight feet ringing with bells a yellow tam pon he dreads scuttle down the High Street checking out The Albert, The Rose the garden at Bombers then down through the York Gate slide in the Tartar Frigate
He buying a pint and question the landlord - “Seh man, I hear something call Folk Week does happen here. You have my brudders from Africa, Ireland and Hingland causing hurricane; djembe and clogs, morris and fiddlers jamming up the town wicked to Kingdom come!? Man I ketch boat, bus and plane to land here but the place so quiet! Is only sea I hearing - tell me is lie they lie ’bout Multiculture and Torchlight Procession?”
The landlord pass Anansi another pint and say, “Mate you late! Folk Week was last week!”
But … those who know Anansi know he always got the last word …
“Brud, no way Anansi late, Anansi come early, ready for next year!”
You’re gone. A voice at the end of the line frizzling into night rushing to ring off as usual (you never have any credit and only have time to say what you phoned for). I’m left cradling plastic and remembering the smell of you all Johnson’s baby and breast milk then later Charles Lauren and I’m wondering how come time moved so fast from when I first held a telephone - Uncle Bert’s black Bakelite - 1966 age 12 before my own migration and the mystery never left, telephones and radios and how come a voice can crawl on cables underneath the ocean and what’s all that stuff about sound waves and now satellites and look mum no hands smaller and smaller mobiles. And now I’m thinking how quickly the words ‘I’m mobile’ become ‘immobile’ with the removal of an apostrophe, remembering how you dropped your h’s as quick as your skirt rose, as quick as your new high boots would allow. And I think of you now in some city whose name I’m not allowed to know, no longer linked by blood but stars and the mystery returns that absence of touch cutting into my flesh like cheese wire.
Yes, track me the scent of my skin on a coast of Paramaribo where a trade wind blowing its precious cargo doesn’t know that one day they’ll build rockets from behind those trees and aim for the moon where this captain is sailing his ship by the stars
Trace me that line of ancestors on that shore Ibo, Hausa, a Madeiran fisherman drawing his nets off a reef waters that flowed from Chechnya and the Nile one single ice-flow melting down from the tundra
I am listening for the soft pad of a footfall morning a Yamomani and Macusi morning a grandfathers-who-don’t-know-their-name-yet morning skins melting into ochre forests where young men are rubbing tinder sticks in the sun and women drape skins even as you
dropping soft-pawed from the rocks spine bristling with porcupine quills into new centuries of prayer flags and eddoes and turbans mimicking a call
land on the prow of this ship and watch the captain as he stares at the stars thumbing his salt-water map his wolf eyes holding the moon
Yes, trace me the scent of my skin on a Paramaribo morning where an archipelago whispering the rosary calls so enticingly. But tread water, wait I don’t wish to arrive yet, not just yet.
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