to bed with john crow batty,
crude white rum, sometimes two bottles,
and think and think and think about the killings,
drift to the slaughter
and the what came next,
the digging, the heaving, the
hiding with dirt,
but most of all how quickly
he and Neville took to acting normal,
went back to simple pickney life.
NEVILLE’S LOGIC
He’d been there with the rest
on garbage duty, cleaning up,
chucking bodies into graves,
sweat for eye water,
free born, speaking English,
no clan or tribal language,
no lash markings on the shoulders,
no embossing on the back,
just a skin, a color, a future
with set duties, some roles:
pickininny to whites,
livestock with language,
to blacks—recruit to toughen
up for backra work.
Jamaica? Their country—
Jamaican? Near white
mustee mulatto quadroon
Nation?
Something more than land
where you is born,
which busha, which estate,
which district near which town?
Until he sees
courthouse square, St. Thomas,
negro, statue with a breath,
helmet, tunic, face fed
well, no whiskers,
belonging
Jamaica Something Force.
Place, rank and country.
Own it. Pass it on.
CLAN
(for Kwame Dawes)
Every clan has its colors, its history, its foes,
its limits, its ways of notching who’s out and in.
Every clan has its parlance, its secrets, its publics,
its fables, its side deals cut with death.
These old street gangs of Kingston,
city ghillies, croton orange, chocho green,
are not manics, but shrewd evaluators
of their worth: shooters part-making an epic,
a story kept in breath, refreshed
at corner fetes of chicken, smoky bread,
at fish spots on the dark foreshore,
waves translating patwa to a lost Aegean tongue.
Hail, Spanglers, Shower,
Byah, Copper, Starkey, Bucky.
Hail, Claudie, Zacky, Rhygin,
Feather Mop.
Every clan has its children, its widows,
its fathers, its prayers, its vengeance pledge,
its poems, its dances, its pictures,
its questions never set.
Who gave the order? When will it end?
Every clan has peaks it never gets to,
humps to get over, mounds of buried hurt.
We belongers sieve the fragments
from the midden, make molds.
Shells. Shit. Skin. Seeds. Bone.
MIMIC
I.
From the chopper shot
the beach is a golden border
on a brown-gray shack town,
a jumble on a point,
sweet flourish of Liberia
sweeping into waves.
My son and I are watching
this in lamplight from our low
brown armless couch,
iced roibos on the low wood table
where I keep a bowl of beat-up cricket balls,
a wink to where he indirectly comes from,
Makonnen, Brooklyn teenager
with Antillean roots
replanted in Rhode Island,
a state petiter than the country
where my navel string was cut.
He’s a boy who loves sketching,
drawing cartoons, eating fish and pasta,
swimming, but most of all
performing accents, likes how
they jokify the mouth.
He
