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But wait, this must come out then...
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Chapter
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But wait, this must come out then. A hidden verb takes inventory of those small years like a person waiting at a corner, counting and growing thin through life as cloth and as water, hush ... Look I hated something, policemen, bankers, slavetraders, shhh ... still do and even more these days. This city, mourning the smell of flowers and dirt, cannot tell me what to say even if it chokes me. Not a single word drops from my lips for twenty years about living here. Dumbfounded I walk as if these sidewalks are a place I’m visiting. Like a holy ghost, I package the smell of zinnias and lady of the night, I hoard the taste of star apples and granadilla. I return to that once grammar struck in disbelief. Twenty years. Ignoring my own money thrown on the counter, the race conscious landlords and their jim crow flats, oh yes! here! the work nobody else wants to do ... it’s good work I’m not complaining! but they make it taste bad, bitter like peas. You can’t smile here, is a sin, you can’t play music, it too loud. There was a time I could tell if rain was coming, it used to make me sad the yearly fasting of trees here, I felt some pity for the ground turned hot and cold. All that time taken up with circling this city in a fever. I remember then, and it’s hard to remember waiting so long to live ... anyway it’s fiction what I remember, only mornings took a long time to come, I became more secretive, language seemed to split in two, one branch fell silent, the other argued hotly for going home. The Poetry of Dionne Brand / 5 ...