You have a choice.
Like the dandelion
flowering within the edge
of a verge or between pavement slabs,
you have a choice.
Arousal. Finding joy
in life, is not something
someone else can give to you.
You must take it.
Like breathing.
Like the tulips coming
up for air, right here. Right now.
You have a choice.
An electric current swirling
always, through you.
Between you and the cherry blossom
bursting into pink glory.
To live from this bounty,
you have a choice.
Commentary: years ago I wrote a poem titled ‘ i am becoming my mother’. I think it’s in my first full collection Family Album, Flambard Press 2011.
A few weeks ago while attending one of my late night across the Atlantic poetry group workshops, I had an inkling to revisit this poem with the intention of bringing it up to date. To try and incorporate all the ‘Sherees’ that have developed, spored since the first poem, since my mum’s death and teachings have passed into decades gone by.
So I created this piece. Same title but definitely more expansive.
i am becoming my mother
Dehumanising the Black woman. Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Bitch.
The black woman is seen as one dimensional; the mule of the world, carrying the heavy burden of mothering all others except her own.
Her own children are lost; lost to the auction block, the ocean, the noose.
A Black woman is a source of strength and love. Passing on power as well as pain.
Her body carries stories, carries histories, carries an archive.
as a black woman,
resting deep within the meadow,
held in softness,
grass tickling shins,
dress billowing about
like blossom,
is a political act.
My real name is submerged
laid down layer upon layer,
year upon year.
Yesterday my name was hushed
Like a dark memory hidden from view.
Today my name will be honour
as torch-beam tight recognition begins.
Secretly, I know my name is a subtle ripple
of time passing, making strange the familiar.
a white banner shifts against Nelson’s Column, ‘KEEP BRITAIN WHITE.’
a bright white suspension of unwelcome and hate
ladies and gentlemen with heads turned up as if taking direction from God himself, listen to the message
from a man, on the platform, with Union Jack legs
as if whiteness and rightness runs through him like quickening sap/
the threat is real murmurs through the crowd/ a gathering searching for answers to stop the invasion
let me enter the scene/ from the extreme right/
let me mingle at the back/ near the man in a flat cap
let me feel the heat of the air/
let me sense the crackle of fear in their white, wholesome bodies
my body would be one of those coloured they want to stop
my body would be one of those aliens they want to exterminate
but what they don’t care to know is that this body belongs to a love evangelist
who’s at pains to show them how love can save us all
if only they’d part their ways and let me through
Each August Bank Holiday weekend,
Notting Hill’s West Indian community
celebrates Caribbean culture. Calypso.
Crates of records. Stacks of speakers.
Reggae, ska, groove, and samba
vibrations of Carnival.
Mid parade, sweaty bodies wining
bodies growing, red stripe flowing.
Pure joy seen as suspicious.
The boys in blue are sent in, in force.
Black batons meet black arms, legs and heads.
Slicing through bodies like cutlass through cane.
Cutdown revellers hauled into hospital
or prison cells. Carnival; a unique
expression of love of self, freedom
and resistance. Therefore it’s spirit
has to be demonised and destroyed.
PC Gumbs, London’s first black policeman
image 09/09/68
My mother says to rub vaseline into my neck
and the collar, to stop the rub; soften the wool.
They say make sure you wear the white bands on your arms,
otherwise they’ll only see ya teeth in the dark.
Only good enough to direct traffic, they roar with laughter.
Brillo pad hair. Toilet set lips.
I say nothing. I recognise the privilege
to wear serve Queen and country.
They say I’m a coconut, sell out, slave
to the white man and Babylon.
They do not spare their vitriol against me.
I survive in the liminal spaces, in the shades of grey.
No one admits the fight has to be from within.
The ranks have to unfiltered by difference.
My mother brought me up on wishes
from velvet green isle;
always with an eye and heart on the other mother.
My birth mother is proud even if this adopted mother
chooses to turn her back, allowing my brothers
in blue to kick the shit out of me too.
“There can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.”
“That is what makes life that the insistence is different, no matter how often you tell the same story if there is anything alive in the telling the emphasis is different.”
Gertrude Stein—from “Portraits and Repetition”
the sky feeds us continuous greys and harsh words from ugly white mouths, and yet we enter the frame
clasped hands in lap or right hand on chest, like in allegiance, mouth forced upwards as best clothes stiffen backs and resolve;
a practised pose, easy to send back home as proof of promises made good, mother country come good, it’s expected
the camera will point and lie for generations; the flash will blind us, to our naivety, to their hate and ungratefulness
Cinnamon sky rumbles
as electric clouds jag
over glass shop fronts.
Scarlet waves fire street
corners, claiming them forever.
Coppers and politicians
worry the faultlines
left behind.
In pursuance of the powers vested in me by section 32 of the Police Act 1964, I, Right Honourable William Whitelaw, one of Her Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State, hereby appoint the Right Honourable Lord Scarman to inquire urgently into the serious disorder in Brixton on 10 to 12 April 1981 and to report, with the power to make recommendations. *
Stories keeps being told, this is a tolerant country. It’s official.
Britain is tolerant, fair and just. There isn’t a race problem. Never was.
People who are different are treated the same. Tolerated. As long as they don’t make a difference.
Small minorities are accepted as long as they stay small.
Get to ‘swamping’, and then these minorities become a threat.
They start to threaten the whole fabric of the superior British characteristics.
Tolerance, liberty and civic duty. Values out the window, when the nation’s anxieties are raised.
Fear. And the country’s doors are closed.
The drawbridge raised.
Their shields are driving them back.
* The Brixton Disorders, 10-12 April 1981, Report of an Inquiry, By the Rt. Hon. The Lord Scarman, O.B.E, November 1981
Living Wild Studios 