Blues and Bliss: The Poetry of George Elliott Clarke

Child Hood I

Child Hood I Geo: Pops beat Ma with belts, branches, bottles. Anything left-handed. Anything at all. He’d buck Ma onto the bed, buckle his hips to hers. Slap her across her breasts, blacken them. Rue: Her terrorized-and tear-shaped breasts. He thought her being Mulatto Was mutilation. (I miss peanut butter cookies, her sewing machine, the grey gloves she let me present to a schoolgirl, her preacher-lover-dad’s secondhand Shakespeare and tattered scripture she taught me to read, her confusingly cream-coloured breasts stupefying dazzling under the threadbare black disintegrating nightshirt she wore to spoonfeed me oatmeal.) Geo: Pops smashed Ma like she was Joe Louis. Stuck a razor to her throat. Struck her down, pelted soft flesh with fists and bricks. Rue: I swung a two-by-four and bust Pop’s face open. Kicked the iron bone that was his skull: Bleeding was so bad I knelt by the stove like I was praying. I wanted to be God. I wanted him dead. Geo: Ma fainted scrubbin some white house’s blackened crap-box. She got a heart stoppage and drooped, kaput. Rue: Years, our only real emotion was hunger. Our thin bellies had to take rain for bread. 24 / Blues and Bliss ...