Poet's World, by Pamela Mordecai

Sharing another Pam Mordecai poem, Poet's World.

Poet's World

Poems grow
in window boxes
or especial corners
of kitchens
where rats hide
or offices where men
above the street
desert their cyphers
of the market place
to track the clouds for rain
or ride the wind
guileless as gulls
oblivious of the girl
upon the desk
who proffers wilting breasts
for a fast lunch - Ah which of us
wants anything but love -

and first upon the hillside where bare feet
in a goat's wake avoiding small brown pebbles
know earth as it was made and men in fields
releasing cotton from the mother tree
milking tits heavy with white wholesomeness
or riding wave on wave of green cane till
the swell abates and the warm wind
finds only calm brown surfaces
thick with the juicy flotsam of the storm
make poems
and men who speak the drum
bembe dundun conga dudups cutter
or blow the brass or play the rhumba box
or lick croix-croix, marimba or tack tack
and women who record all this
making the tribe for start in blood
and sending it to school to factory
to sea to office, university to death
make poems

and we who write them down
make pictures intermittently
(sweet silhouettes, fine profiles,
a marked face) but the bright light
that makes these darknesses
moves always always beyond mastery
Griot older than time
on Zion hill
weaving a song into eternity.


From: Jamaica Woman: An Anthology of Poems. Heinemann Educational Books
Copyright 1980 Pamela Mordecai.
Reprinted with author's permission.