Poems from abroad...
Two poems based on time spent in Africa and the West Indies in the '80s.
I have been remarkably lucky in that I have travelled extensively in my lifetime.
Below are two poems based on my experiences. The first relates to Freetown and Shenge, in Sierra Leone, where I spent a short time teaching; the second concerns an incident in Grenada in the West Indies. My visits there being many years ago were inevitably formative experiences.
Freetown ~ Shenge, 1982 2p bought you untroubled passage through the airport. That ancient battery-powered cassette player? - No questions asked. Crowded against the ferry’s paint-chipped rail collective White excitement seemed inoculation enough though a humid hour later driving past vulture-crowned market stalls romance was harder to find. Bravado forced you to point (but not at the ragged children, the stump-legged beggars), your internal voice whispering “what the….?” ~ The house they’d built for whoever came next would have been at home on the Downs; all clean lines, space and light, as if it had been air-lifted in or someone had found a faded copy of House and Home and used it in lieu of Architect’s drawings. Yet they wouldn’t let you live there something somewhere inevitably unfinished. It was as if they’d snatched back the prize they’d given you, an Oscar-sized mistake. Later still, when you walked the beach alone (having drunk the village dry) the remorseless Atlantic crashing against the shingle, you knew you needed to rework your definition of romance. I still do.
[I was in Sierra Leone during a brief civil war in 1982: curfews, soldiers on the streets etc.]
in Grenada (1986) between Gouyave and Florida there was a bend in the road so severe you had to take it in first slower than you could walk tighter than ninety degrees it fell away like a rollercoaster that moment when you’re plunged downward your life accelerating away from you decades of tropical storms carved ruts into traps for tyres like scalextric grooves from which the only escape is to fly from a corner undone by ambition you took that like a local they said struggling with guilt he assumed it was a compliment no matter he was driving a hired four-by-four had money in his pocket white in his skin
Thanks, and I did like the poem very much, it embraces place so very well. Below, one I wrote on the invasion...'Fish' liked it some years back, albeit only as far as 'longlist'..
all best wishes,
Alan
Postcard from Grand Anse
Concerning the US invasion of Grenada, 25 October 1983
Big Beach sounds better in French, describing
the two-mile strand of fine white coral sand.
It gives a graceful arc to the lagoon.
The sea is crystal of course. Deep water
deep blue after the shallows of the reef.
The reef did not hinder the troops’ landing.
Nor did the barbed wire stretched across the shore.
They came, they said, with an urgent fury.
It’s easy to park at the beach, picnic
beneath coconut and tall cabbage palms.
Frangipani, bougainvillea, poui
bloom and entwine the beach-bar verandah.
Seaward, frigate birds fight, soar and then dive
to grasp squid. Light-attack aircraft, Corsairs,
howl on their Carrier, and overfly
Grand Anse to bomb the Carenage and town.
It didn’t feel like a restoration of order, as light attack aircraft howled, overflew Grand Anse and the Carenage to bomb strategic sites ,like the hospital, and kill the mental patients therein…they called this invasion of a commonwealth nation an intervention, their mission, “urgent fury”.