Hi Caribbean poetry fans!
I should have posted this a while back, but I have not been updating the blog for a while. What can I say? Life has been happening!
Anyway, I am happy to add my congratulations to Danielle Boodoo-Fortune, on the publication of her first book of poetry,
Doe Songs (Peepal Tree Press). I have featured Danielle on the blog in the past, and I am excited to be sharing more about her work here.
If you haven't yet, get your copy, and give me your feedback.
In the meantime, enjoy a poem from Danielle, entitled,
Petitioning the Patron Saint of Childbirth:
There is a place not far from here where
two rivers meet the sea, a shore dark
and pitted as a caiman's back.
My thoughts drift here when I pray to you,
to swollen water and lonely pit,
tide-risen belly of a mangrove god.
Every white room I enter is untruth.
The doctor is not my maker. He can barely keep
my bones together. He cannot sew me
into wholeness, even with your holy medallion
round my neck. Oh saint, there is so much
I cannot tell you.
Perhaps I will confide in Xochiquetzal,
goddess of childbirth, mother of ocelots and flowers.
Perhaps I will write letters
to my own mother with invisible pigment
made of colostrum and brine.
But these words are all seeds; hard-shelled
and deep-veined like nutmeg, falling to earth
in careless handfuls. I know this forest of silence
is of my own making.
Now what can you say to me
that the wild Atlantic has not?
I've already heard the one about
everything happening for a reason.
Dear saint, I know you will not
take me in your pristine arms
and make me weightless, even if I beg
Behind my eyes at night there is only water,
my unborn child inside me a turn of turtles
flailing in the deep, crossing the unknown.
Source: Poetry Foundation. Accessed October 2, 2019
