Fierce Departures: The Poetry of Dionne Brand

There it was anyway, some damn memory...

There it was anyway, some damn memory half-eaten and half hungry. To hate this, they must have been dragged through the Manzinilla spitting out the last spun syllables for cruelty, new sound forming, pushing toward lips made to bubble blood. This road could match that. Hard-bitten on mangrove and wild bush, the sea wind heaving any remnants of consonant curses into choking aspirate. No language is neutral seared in the spine’s unravelling. Here is history too. A backbone bending and unbending without a word, heat, bellowing these lungs spongy, exhaled in humming, the ocean, a way out and not anything of beauty, tipping turquoise and scandalous. The malicious horizon made us the essential thinkers of technology. How to fly gravity, how to balance basket and prose reaching for murder. Silence done curse god and beauty here, people does hear things in this heliconia peace a morphology of rolling chain and copper gong now shape this twang, falsettos of whip and air rudiment this grammar. Take what I tell you. When these barracks held slaves between their stone halters, talking was left for night and hush was idiom and hot core. 2 / Fierce Departures ...