Give me back my maiden name
and words for wonders that were mine:
bearded fig, sacred silk, forest, chalky mount and gully.
Let mine ancient baobab be, seed spanning
a sky of sea. Give me back mine own,
my name, my nyam.
Return to me my coral reefs,
limestone sweet with noises, secrets traded
in her dreams, wading deep in otherworlds
and other tongues
she’s been. Feel her rhythm in the winds,
how she sings clear of the shore of sargassum.
Be not afeared, be not afeared.
Give me back my red clay soil,
my virgin state before the trafficked goods
and chattel, great house, hut, cut stone, wood
and concrete jungle,
give me before the cane arrowed
and mills overran like giants tilting at the sweating, the sweating sun.
Take back your plantation yard,
your hell-plantation-nigger-yard,
with its bodies, blood, buried, and the bawling tamarind.
But leave the tree, its fruit, the flesh. The tongue tie-up
but the seed is just a seed to suck clean—
is not, is not a haunting.
Take back your twisted plot,
your subdivided fields and hills and tenantries,
your terrace, heights, lows christened for massa and the massacre
and the long-memoried ones that once roamed,
put down root and were uprooted—
my offspring, offshooting.
But let me
Not mis-chant….
I dig, I do
the deep dive,
the archaeological find,
the archive of fragment, bead, comb.
Ceramic pot, mine history in layers, the overlap
I like, admire, want, desire, alas I fear,
I dig there can be no mosaic, no me
without the broken pieces,
without the shards,
the sharp end
of the stick,
the whip,
the crack—
crick....
But still....
Give me back this rim of earth
before the first spill of blood, return me
to my unsettled self, as I was found, return to me
silence born not of fear or of haunting,
nor to keep the next ones safe or in the dark,
but to keep them, just to keep them....
Repair to me my stolen goods:
my Self, a dreaming stone,
continent coralled to a crowded dot, outlier
in an arc of sisters rousing from sleep—repair me
to the rem of possibilities
and not back, not back into nightmare
and,
I swear,
I will reset
the run of days,
the seasons ’til nighttime catch.
Give me back the centuries, the single shot
to get it right, rewrite the bold experiment, all you
damn arrivants, a do-over, a chance
to fail better this time, fire
better, next time...
not to crack,
to crick
until....
I chant
my dreaming self awake. Remember me:
my forest, red clay, gully, gleaming teeth, remember me,
my caves slick with the drip-drip, the trick-
trickle down of ages, remember, remember me,
the name
they say was mine,
is mine.
Ichirouganaim, Ichirouganaim
And what came
Before the name
And what lies
Beyond the name?
Ichirouganaim, Ichirouganaim?
Los Barbados
To be Barbados
Or Barbadose’d
Wuhloss, Buhaybaduss!
Little Englanded
Bimmed, shired
Wuh de 114, muh 246?
What de history books seh?
What fake fact Google an’ de Chatbot seh?
Eccentric outlier at the edge of an arc— first & last port of call to & from the Motherland?
What came before and what lies beyond
Ichirouganaim?
My name. My nyam.
I am.
I am.