MOSTLY LATE IN June, mostly, when elderly flamboyas tie their heads with scarves of red flowers, or when I’ve slowed enough to stop and notice things samsungish priced “do not touch,” my gazes drift to social sculpture and loiter like the shadows soft art-gallery lighting cannot easily forget.
“THIS TREE IS the kill-tree. The leaves, the roots, the bark. Every part of it is poisonous. It does kill.”
“You mean I go die?”
“No, you have to eat it.” He laughed. “Nothin’s gonna happen to you.”
He began to crack the nuts, popping them into his mouth, chewing rapidly as he did so, eating noisily with his mouth open and chuckling to himself every now and then.
The rhythm strummed from an electric guitar by a Tobagonian hand
Stirs in the gyrating waste of some carnival reveller over in Trinidad.
The sweat beading the backs of Vincentian farmers planting bananas
Is wiped off the brows of construction workers toiling in the Bahamas
As that in the river
Is in the sea to which it runs
Like each finger is
A part of the hand it is on
Like that only day
With a never setting sun
We all are one
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife and children, and brethren, and sisters, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14, 25-33
HE STOOD like a sentry guarding old Smithy’s rum-shop, his eyes as black as the coals Ma cooked with, or the black birds she warned would pick out our eyes if we didn’t stop being so hard-ears—her warning always followed by the tired refrain, “Hard-ears yuh wun hear, own way yuh does feel!”
BASHAOW! Alfred sprang upright at the sound of the second crash of waves. Half awake when he heard the first bashaow of water hitting sand and rocks, he thought he had been dreaming. It was around four thirty in the morning, not yet light. He swung out of bed, walked over to the chair next to the bedroom door and picked up the pair of swimming trunks, the pair of shorts and the T-shirt he had left there the night before.
