Poetry Friday: Cynthia James

Malpeque 

I was searching for two equal halves of shell, 
the tide was out, the sea had disappeared, 
so I could walk far out the ocean floor - 
two matching cups, flesh-coloured 
on the inside, shaped by what they once held. 

No need to dig, these chip-chip were on the surface, dead;
but so many of the outstanding were unhinged,
and even those un-afflicted in the head were badly 
frayed, battered, left behind in the spume’s wake –
some big, some small, not text-book pretty, but different -
Ask Rihanna … all cut along the selvedge,

some bronzed, some bevelled, some striated, 
some the colour of donkey-eyes, 
some fat and black like Orinoco sea coconuts,
some pale, transparent, shaped like  Douens’ hats, 
some like hanging fingernails, white chips from an enamel posy, 
(dented just at the upturned lip, near the curved ear-grip) – 

yet all were heirlooms, antiques, unusual; 
with a whiff of Balandra, curry-chip-chip, steamed 
down in coconut milk with a blade of stinging nettle 
(aka chardon beni), on top, a blood orange scotch bonnet. 
Vat 19! Something to “Awake the Spirit!”
You’d know it when you saw it.

Yes, many seemed to have it, until I picked them up.
Clutches of Malpeque shells, I picked up 
to find a right side to match a left side, 
fine Muscovado clawed all up under my finger nails;
and the further out I got, more bosey my back bent;
until I heard something like a conch blast and looked back. 

So far I’d come?  And no exact match? 
Nothing whole, nothing that made sense?
I’d never thought much before of the mounds I had despoiled; 
tide in - tide out, facing the Atlantic chip-chip was always there. 
Now just a clutter of so-called good halves in my hand -
Should I drop everything and go back? But go back where?

©Cynthia James 2013



About Cynthia James

Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo,Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.




Blog Disclosure Policy

Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot receives a percentage of the purchase price on anything you buy through links to Amazon, Shambala Books, Hay House, or any of the Google ads or Google Custom Search.


***

Disclaimer of Endorsement

The documents posted on this Web site may contain hypertext links or pointers to information created and maintained by other public and private organizations. These links and pointers are provided for visitors' convenience. I do not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of any linked information. Further, the inclusion of links or pointers to other Web sites or agencies is not intended to assign importance to those sites and the information contained therein, nor is it intended to endorse, recommend, or favor any views expressed, or commercial products or services offered on these outside sites, or the organizations sponsoring the sites, by trade name, trademark, manufacture, or otherwise.

Reference in this Web site to any specific commercial products, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm or corporation name is for the information and convenience of the site's visitors, and does not constitute endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by this blog.

Poetry Friday: Cynthia James

Writing Forward
 
Hold nothing against the daffodil,
potent against the cancer of self-love and aged forgetfulness;
but beware the bulb; mistake it not for the onion;
it can kill; it’s subtext for the Ides of March, but also
‘comes before the swallow dares’ in The Winter’s Tale;
grind and smear it on topical wounds only;
for it’s death and spring, bad luck and morning glory;
it flowered in the Garden of Gethsemane and at Stonehenge;
meanwhile turn the page; it’s the only way to complete
your chapter of the story, you Mau-Mau-ed, castrated,
you waiting for the return of the Balangiga and the Kohinoor;
the eye of history is longer than you can imagine;
learn the lore of all bush medicine with thanksgiving;
go where you will, love where you will, live where you will
 
© Cynthia James October 2012


About Cynthia James

 
Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo,Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.

Poetry Friday: Cynthia James

May Shuttlecock

 
The day before, I’d left the gold leaf candelabras in Cantaro;
white holy ghosts wing-spanned the high blue apse of Santa Cruz;
I was confirmed again, crowned with cascading tulle, wild lilies
and forget-me-nots. ‘Twas May, the rains had not yet
washed away the yellow candles kindling tender fires,
and surfeited, I wondered how and why I’d sunk so low
within the vale to miss the Hubble view and give this up.
The old singer in the corner needed but a shuttle;
I went out and bought, passing the day soft, loud
pedalling the treadle’s lockstitch revolutions.
The next day my flight confirmed, I climbed the clouds,
suction-cupped my ears, swore against all birds, and landed
routinely at Pearson. By evening I’d trod fallen acacia crisps,
windblown bread crumbs, and yellow buttons helix-spiked,
kicking heads sprung in thawed and tilled dogs pats.

***

Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo,Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.





Follow @GeoffreyPhilp

“The Sugar Clock” by Cynthia James

 

This setting back and forwarding
the clock, lengthening and shortening time,
is not in my experience
 
I learned and laboured under one timepiece,
the sugar clock, somewhere near the great house
deep in the crevice of my ear still going strong
 
the wailing ICTA horn blaring at five to seven, five to twelve and five to four;
more than a century of wailing - (1820s to 1921 - estate,
usine - plantation time seems distant!)
 
when to pick up tools, when to lay them down and when to lunch -
I have no picture of this timepiece, no sense of what it was,
but in the bowel of the you-we sugar factory, sure it was!
 
Some say ‘twas pressured steam, but in my mind
it was a round alarm with finger lever, iron, brass or shiny silver,
nippled like the cycle bell Works workers rode out, clicking after it went off.
 
Who pulled it? Or was it automatic?
Did its wail wind round the campus weekends, too, when I was gone?
Or did absentee hands run round its face invisibly
 
like on these fancy modern digitals?
Halfway between a warning and rebellion
sometimes it sounded like a conch! but no, it was no conch,
 
or else I’d seen a Maroon man, built say like the Orisha Andrew,
master drummer, going in and out.
I moved in step with it, shell shocked.
 
Who turned it off? And when?
Did its sly slumbering regime rankle you-we historians?
Who knows the what and why, the grip of memory?
 
Oriens Ex Occidente Lux
Did it shut off on its accord when the steam engine rusted?
When did it cease to be that relic of “the bulwark that we watch” way south?
 
 
 
©Cynthia James 2012

 
 
 
Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo, Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.

***

If you enjoyed this post, check out my page on Amazon. I’d also be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook. Thank you!
 

"Cutting Lent" by Cynthia James

Cutting Lent


We’d cut lent, little finger hooked like chain link, 
talk for-fended; and if you couldn’t or forgot 
to hold it in, you’d face the consequences 


mouth open, jackass jawbone dropping, 
better say it safe, unsaid in the roaming mind, 
self-witness only to itself, than witless in the wind;


one day respite, thank St. Joseph;  but if you were really good, 
you did the whole forty days, Palm Sunday, Passion Week,  
waited for the hot cross buns and image of a ship-shape forming


on the hot stone of a cracked Good Friday egg. But first the ashes;
you had to hang Shrove Tuesday’s clang of cowbells on a crossed stave. 
New dispensation; carne vale; that long time Lent is here again.




© Cynthia James, February 2012

 
Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo, Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.




***


If you enjoyed this post, check out my page on Amazon. I’d also be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook. Thank you!

"Buxton Lady Under Lock Down" by Cynthia James

Buxton Lady Under Lock Down

 

we would sit in the elephant ear of a marble queen, 
icing dusting the skylight, listening to the wattle 
wheezing through the atrium, the karaoke 
tinkle of Ol’Virginny, Ol’ Kentucky Home inside


warm apple cider drunk, she’d say, “Those songs 
we learnt in school, is only when I come I understand. 
But I is from Kaywana stock; this place make you 
more black. You must bring me some cocoa butter 


when you coming next time,” rubbing Buxton spice;
we watched cars swish, slip, slurping past grey fingered trees
“Was a day like this that send me here; white, no headlights; 
I didn’t see, nobody see, nobody say, nobody talk for me; he


burn like crisp; if wasn’t for my Buxton pride I dead already.”
but summer she was different; then we went out on Wheel-Trans. 
“Look,” she says, “Imagine me who make with nail, tinin and 
hammer, grater from scratch, buying coconut in frozen 


quarter pound square pack. You know bout metamgee?  
conkie? A tumbler of swank, Man, down the hatch!”
Then we would join the ladies for some checkers, bingo, 
even take in the fashion show. “Is a man you know! 


Wait till she start to strip. We ask the recreation people 
for her every year.” And she shouting loud, “Go more! 
Take off the shirt!” And bad talk Victor, her one and only son,
full of guile who just so, she-say-he-say, “Let’s go for a drive ...”


but she going back for her gold ring on the bureau
the Deceased Egbert give her. Now that was man!
“I could teach you the computer; you’ll like Facebook,”
“Unh-unh,” she said, “is a long long way to Tipperary.
 Dawg a lay down, ashes cold.”

©Cynthia James 2012




 
About Cynthia James

 
Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo, Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.
 

***

“Christmas Flash Mob” by Cynthia James

so they lit the third candle, the rose among the mauve,

a half-split caimito really, on the evergreen, the plum,

gradating to a fuschia, vulva-centred, fleshy white,

a moist black star buried in every quadrant whorl

but no witness to this story to fill its many gaps:

how a girl hearing voices that she pregnant

(second hand), just ups and take a journey

to a distant land to visit an old cousin by herself,

that a baby leaping in a womb confirm; they say

she end up staying with the cousin six months

and the cousin husband, old Mahal, you know Mahal,

revving car and turning corner, with lip and foot and hand;

he doubt; they light a candle on his head; strike him dumb;

and Shadrack, too, for years we live with Shadrack,

walking up and down with rope, brown gown and jesus-

sandals clanging bell, a dead ringer for the same John

so I’m telling Bev about this flash mob, livening the humdrum,

this Sunday stir up, twelve-eleven; people in their dan dan!

Everybody singing: Exultez de joie, acclamez votre roi!

led by a doe-eyed angry man playing an organ

and I say: We just practising to maim and kill tomorrow

the only way we know how. See those stalks clawing

the promised fire at the centre of the ash coal dawn?

See how right now we longing for the white stuff?

All this, One cycle, One répétition. Near Easter, we

cursing the same white stuff: White Stuff, Begone!

and my daughter ups and say: You know you! You’d better

keep your mouth shut! Your great grandmother shut her mouth

so you could born. You always jeopardizing things, opening

up your big mouth. But I tell her: No worries, this poem not

getting print no how. Is just you know how sometimes when

you’re breathing and you notice that you’re breathing, just so

you start to gasp because you cannot find your rhythm? Well

the half-split caimito’s just a figment of that Carib woman

far from home, dreaming a slice-a black cake, and a slice-a

Scrunter pork and a drink a ponche à crème! Ah! to top it off

© Cynthia James 2011

About Cynthia James

Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo, Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse

"All Saints - November 2011" by Cynthia James

All Saints - November 2011

causa latet vis est notissima - Ovid

the cause is hidden, but its force is very well known

My Dear GPS

You’ve asked me to confirm; thus I assure

the tremors you experience underground

are not the elephants of Hannibal, nor is

Vesuvius the cause. The cacophony awakening

Hades, I’m afraid, and Charon’s frequent trips

across the Styx have quite a different source.

The old girl’s quiescent these past sixty-seven

years. Nonetheless, bombs and fire flashes rain

from up above with pulverizing might, such that

Lower Sirtis mirrors the Pompeii we last saw.

Myriad Homeric and Virgilian versions abound,

but, My Honourable Uncle, since you ask:

Alas! Priam and Hector again were cornered.

the rebels and the rabble both claim triumph;

but all that’s certain (perhaps not in disorder)

is that both were dragged through the streets;

then slain; then photographed for posterity with

V-signs. There were long lines while all rejoiced.

I saw the golden gun;

I heard the berried W-A-A-W;

viewer caution was advised, but old voyeur of our

munera, I watched it all on HD and in 3-D, I might add,

(complicit, some opine, oblivious of our tradition)

from a distance like in that old Gold-Midler song.

But that’s old news in the coliseum -

just like these that I’ll be brief about:

Carthage and Alexandria still under siege;

sorry for so long a letter, but an earthquake

also shook a pilate’s podium while he washed

his hands; in Otta-war as the broadcasters say,

a bunch of crazy people last month chanted

“Arrest George Bush”; serpentine floods

challenge the promise given Noah, wash away

Thailand and Guatemala; even in Paradise,

all man and woman under heavy manners –

curfew in their tail for more than six months.

Yet take comfort; the legacy of Caesar, perhaps

a little rattled, nonetheless,  remains intact.

This letter pales compared with multifarious

more illustrious troubadour accounts;

but rest assured, you can depend on me,

My Venerable Uncle, there’s more to come

Farewell

P

© Cynthia James, November, 2011

About Cynthia James

Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo, Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse

"24 hrs 2 Guinea" by Cynthia James

24 hrs 2 Guinea

the rosewood dawn recedes, thin laced with

milk-heart signatures;  the ice below thaws;

brown strangled tufts raise pickanini heads

in cracks of sidewalks

bees are not yet out, but ants climb up and down

viburnum stalks (flush now with scented clusters

where scarce a month ago this sweet lime hedge

was briar patched with thorns),

shivering white petals, antennae digging deep down

in  the calyx, feeler-ing  the nippled berries hardening

at the cup;  it’s Saturday, mid-May exactly;

and all is good.

at broadview,  where I board, the streetcar driver leaps out

to single-point a crowbar switch, the witch-broom trailing,

pulling us suspended on the centre rail, backwards

to Main from Carlton.

and I go past the diasporic new-world united nations

line-up, urging cringing baby bok choy, Ch-u-ut!

to stand up to the threatening fangs

of blood red dragon fruit;

at little India, watch the wind float the sari

of the woman with the nakpul and the red dot,

ripple damask drapes and Himalayan pelts

without a touch;

glide over earthen jugs, brass vases, shiny cooking pots,

guarded slant-eyed by smiling amulets of Durga, Kali, Shakti,

juggling creation and destruction in multiples of even hands;

mid-May exactly, a Saturday,

and all is quiet;

but time is a chameleon, every so often confounding near and distant; 

today I’m the Guinea woman, flying three, four, five hundred years,

reeled back  before my time across the skein of difference, 

a frothy wake of spume

dribbling down my chin like soap suds, splashed up from Monday

morning white clothes wash, spores popping as the scum dries,

under the dingy ochred outer circle of a cappuchino sky;

we’ve run off track

without point-catch in a modern city mapped on ancient legends; 

a heart shakes off its smouldering ash, and there’s Akan Oroonoko,

trussed up like a suckling pig, puffing on a pipe, taunting his tormentors.

eyes kindle hard-stare accusation;

otherwise, sudoku and the 24- hour paper occupy; meanwhile

brown babies nonchalantly chatter, mocking this old street car,

pulling me, Guinea woman, back to a different place and time 

About Cynthia James

Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo, Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse

***

"Dentonia" by Cynthia James

Dentonia

Maybe I’ll learn to love here where

they don’t know a cold Carib is to die for;

where people don’t love like in a brighter sun

those they love ‘beat under love’

and love to death themselves and those they love -

it’s June; the stone- washed denim sky’s the same,

 roiled at cuffs; eyelet holed skyscrapers stand

tall, stick men wearing dark shades in the evening

sun beyond the baseball red brick diamond;

but a couple kissing in a street of riot

deepens faith in love amid a city’s loss,

here in Dentonia, too, among the astral yellow dandelion

weeds:  for just as many spent, a cloudy intertwining helix

spiked and seamed with DNA disperses promise

for the bissextile and even the year after:

an eternity of love. Yet flame-torched eyelids

shutter-less travelling slits, singed plucked chicken,

bare of all fine hairs and yellow skin, stand guard,

slumber-less; willing to shut out spit and sizzle -

coz every time he comes, my Saga Boy, his smile deflowers;

even when he screws the can, his Bitch, Tan-Tan can’t even run;

“Don’t light me up again ... Please ... Please...”

 ...aspergent splash ... match scratch ... Boom!

-          yolk ringed in white lace bubbles rippling in a pan of butter

pumiced flesh in heavy metal acid wash -

yet in this refuge far removed from Mango Bascapool, Doux Doux Darling,

and YES! Tabanca, love perchance again will come

in this white desert, this weedy astral dandelion patch,

eyes wide open in a whirlpool haze of summer

amid shade trees I cannot name nor claim,

(but does that really matter?)

About Cynthia James



Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo, Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.

Upcoming Posts and Events

The next two weeks during Caribbean-American Heritage Month are already jam-packed with events and activities:

The Anancy Festival

Reading from Marcus and the Amazons @ Mt. Carmel Missionary Baptist Church

Release of my new children's e-book Marcus and the Amazons

Clear Marcus Garvey's Name

Part Two of Marcus Garvey's Crime

Book Review: This Strange Land by Shara McCallum

New poem by Cynthia James

Ol' Time Sinting

The Impact of Rastafari on the Culture of Jamaica and the World

Stay tuned!


***

Related articles

• "Miss Sally on Politics" by Shara McCallum (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• New Book: This Strange Land by Shara McCallum (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• "Luck" by Shara McCallum (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• ACTION: Clear Marcus Garvey's Name (continued) > Geoffrey Philp's Blog Spot (kalamu.posterous.com)
• Marcus Garvey's Crime (Part One) (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Petition: Clear Marcus Garvey's Name (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Clear Marcus Garvey's Name (continued) (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Clear Marcus Garvey's Name (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• ACTION: Clear Marcus Garvey's Name (kalamu.posterous.com)
• The Third Annual Anancy Festival (repeatingislands.com)

"Sunday Friends" by Cynthia James

Sunday Friends

On this ill May day trestles are laid, sausages sizzle and split

there is bread, baked beans and Quiche Lorraine

faith, hope and charity displayed;

but stick a pin -

my grief’s chaptered in the pages of the ages

anthologized, googly-fied on countless web pages,

put to bed;  we’re safe

“Come sit with us,” they say, and let me listen to them talk

offer more bread, more sausage;  “Eat,” they say; pressing  

a doggie bag when I’m full; “Or we’ll have to throw it out.”

to them I’m either a gang-raped Rwandan, an

earthquake Haitian or a refugee Côte D’Ivoirian.

My specifics, the backseat crush of a Curepe PH- taxi

in the ripening armpit of a macomère;  what’s the difference

my Monday- Wednesday-Friday friends,

work irregular hours; Sundays on Sundays off;

shifters scanning subway schedules strapped to poles:

weather watchers, PSW day and night-care givers,

an open Bible here, Asian or Arabic hieroglyphics there,

“It’s cold today!”  “Did the 23 go up?”

“I just missed it; the driver saw me but he didn’t stop.”

or else silence ...

i-Pod mantras stream through womb-shaped wires

avoiding common words in this tired old experience;

a stilted ESL confounds betrayal of what  

we wouldn’t know how to, or are too afraid to say;

So on this ill May Day I break bread with my Sunday friends

I pray with, sing with, laugh with, even trust enough to tell my sins;  

but stick a pin -

for the Knights of Columbus have set the tables

my servers, their sisters, the charitable daughters of Isabelle:

my great- great- great- grandmother must be turning in her grave.

“Sunday Friends” by Cynthia James.

About Cynthia James:

Cynthia James is a Trinidadian, living for the past 3 years in Toronto. She writes poetry and fiction and her work can be found in publications such as Callaloo, Caribbean Writer and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.

***