Writing
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Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, likea light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was…
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(To Che, not in memoriam) Your skin linked to the bone was lost in the earth. The tear, the poem and the memory are carving on the fire the song of death with golden machine-guns from wherever you are. And here, each night your books are searched for the just motive of all action and…
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1. in the shower naked he bends to suck milk life urge engulfs we tumble into stream barely able to separate closed in by the enamel fist 2. before the mirror he comes up as i look at myself cups them and squeezes they jump up hard nipples in dance-ritual he’s to my back enters…
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Dear Saint Patrick, this is Peggy, Or maybe it’s Pegeen to you, Well, I’m really Stella Mae. Peggy’s my nickname, But anyway, will you please tell me What to do about the rattlesnake That’s in my room? I know it’s there, But I can’t find it anywhere I search. I’ve ransacked the closet more than…
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Deprived of their original language, the captured and indentured tribes create their own, accreting and secreting fragments of an old, an epic vocabulary, from Asia and from Africa, but to an ancestral, an ecstatic rhythm in the blood that cannot be subdued by slavery or indenture, while nouns are renamed and the given names of…
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A noun sentence, no verb to it or in it: to the sea the scent of the bed after making love … a salty perfume or a sour one. A noun sentence: my wounded joy like the sunset at your strange windows. My flower green like the phoenix. My heart exceeding my need, hesitant between…
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Strange but true is the story of the sea-turtle and the shark- the instinctive drive of the weak to survive in the oceanic dark. Driven, riven by hunger from abyss to shoal, sometimes the shark swallows the sea-turtle whole. The sly reptilian marine withdraws, into the shell of his undersea craft, his leathery head and…
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Two of my poems, The Death of California Revisited & Weaver Woman, were just published by Outward Link. Check them out!
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for Lois, deceased he described you as a cracker battle axe but the woman i met was thin and haint-like i spoke to you as little as one can speak to an in-law and get along as did you we never called one another by name converse for the sake of function biding, tolerant whenever…
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At the beginning of last winter, I made a reading list of books I wanted to read for 2011. Looking over the list, I see that finished two of them (Wild Seed and Half of a Yellow Sun , read partial amounts of others (Omeros and The Odyssey) and put all the others away for…
Tichaona Chinyelu 