“…the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time”.
—Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
What remains to be said, written and sung?
What remains to be said, written and sung?
We have been to the end of history and back again.
We have returned from cities of perfection,
come again to narrow lanes of Belmont,
sat in the King’s halls of Cambridge, re-entered March and
walked with laureates in Boston, Stockholm, Castries,
climbed hills of shanties above Fort-de-France,
swam in Skeete’s Bay, drank over late-night fish on Baxter’s Road, Bridgetown,
laughed with reggae stars and kaiso kings,
strolled pagodas in Tokyo, temples in Kyoto,
and prayed in simple pews of village churches.
Love has left wrinkled skins of loneliness,
children gone to far countries, as they must,
lovers distracted by diversions of age
and old flames rekindling dead wood.
What remains to be sung, made poetry of,
of all those gone-so-quickly hours?
All of it, I guess, that voyage of a life,
if you are brave enough to find
metaphors of the metaphysical in it.
In all the messy stuff,
the sacred and sacramental
in certain failures,
in bird-call insisting, insisting,
pup saying something to a goat in the yard,
konpa music coming up the hill,
child shrieking somewhere in a house,
and so on, all of it there,
in your present timeline,
in your hearing, now,
now threading that life and its inebriated days,
your weary hunger for affection, for affirmation,
the shifty-eyed hope of faith, of redemption,
years inevitably winding in their spiral
to that moment of the epilogue of your biography.
So, write it down and say it like a griot, sing it strong
like a chantwèl over shack-shack, drums and violin,
like Bob Marley still wailing from passing vans
over the lost cities of yards.