Summer keeps counting
stars in clear night skies.
He cannot count me.

Storm keeps counting
rain pellets in her heart.
She cannot count me.

Light keeps counting
things. She won’t ever stop.
She cannot count me.

Death keeps counting
hordes of sparrows and starlings,
hairs on your head, and

bare bones on heaps. But
I’m hiding behind closed fingers.
He cannot count me.
_______________________________________________________________

a spring flows out of a mountain
_______________________________________________________________

Who knows, some day we’ll hammer out a cure
for cruelty, corruption, cowardice,
clean out the house for springtime, sweep the floor.

create a pattern, not caricature
of natural justice, without prejudice,
let in the wind that’s hammering at the door.

But human suffering? Don’t be so sure.
In practice every theory goes amiss.
Clean out the house for springtime. Sweep the floor.

We go the way the flies go. Dust, manure
or ashes will be all that’s left of us.
Let in the wind that’s hammering at the door.

We can trust nothing, nowhere rest secure
except in love, for love is limitless.
Clean out the house for springtime. Sweep the floor.
Let in the wind that’s hammering at the door.

Breath glows and glories through me as I bear
these words on wind. I know. I have the knack.
Lucky I draw my breath from everywhere.

The words fragment. Their threads break. Textures tear.
Their prints shine white on white or black on black.
The wind calls and I love it. Meet me there.

These signs convert to sighs that vent on air
like smoke and steam, or the washed rainbow’s track.
Lucky I draw my breath from everywhere.

Death knows I know. With each breath I’m aware
he can’t be stopped. Despite his sure attack
the wind calls and I love it. Meet me there.

Across a bridge far finer than a hair
these words shall pass our deaths. Death’s gates will crack.
Lucky I draw my breath from everywhere.
The wind calls and I love it. Meet me there.

The dead and the unborn
fill plenty’s horn

giving and forgiving
life for the living.

on my hand mothered by a refugee’s daughter,
first opened in blitzed London, grown big
through post-war years safe in suburban England,

on my pink, educated, ironical left hand
of a parvenu not quite British pseudo gentleman
which first learned to scrawl its untutored messages

among Latin-reading rugby-playing militarists
in an élite boarding school on Sussex’s green downs
and against the cloister walls of puritan Cambridge,

on my hand weakened by anomie, on my
writing hand, now of a sudden willingly
stretched before me in Serbian spring sunlight,

on my unique living hand, trembling and troubled
by this May visitation, like a virginal
leaf new sprung on the oldest oak in Europe,

on my proud firm hand, miraculously blessed
by the two thousand eight hundred martyred
men, women and children fallen at Kragujevac,

a blue butterfly simply fell out of the sky
and settled on the forefinger
of my international bloody human hand.

What punishment can ever make amends?
There’s no pretext, excuse or alibi.
It is the death of children most offends.

Whoever offers arguments pretends
to read fate’s lines. Although we must swear by
what justice is, nobody comprehends

how destiny or chance weaves. Who defends
their motives with fair reasons tells a lie.
It is the death of children most offends.

Death can’t deserve to reap such dividends
from these, who scarcely lived, their parents cry.
What justice is, nobody comprehends.

Bring comfort then, and courage. Strangers, friends,
are we not all parents when children die?
What justice is, nobody comprehends.
It is the death of children most offends.

a paid murderer swilling
coffee burned his lips
but did not curse

seven sparrows glancing
adoringly at airwaves
stayed put on their wire

five doped-out slaves
passing in chains lifted
stooped eyes, comprehending

the novice prayermaster
turned his head, his mouth
an awed O

and canny winds stopped
swirling, and blew seawards
orchestrally

____________________________________________________________
grace in white like a winged horse

the cheesemakers
and yoghurt pourers sighed
in their large blouses

a legless beggar, perched
on cardboard in his colonnade
stopped twitching his lips

for five long seconds
the corner butcher held
his cleaver in mid swipe

a ringletted redhead’s irises
from their habitual brown
burned gold streaked green

and the woman selling
strawberries laughed
remembering something

____________________________________________________________
grace in pure white

No bitterness comes out of thin slices
of lemon loaf you cut at the kitchen
window as I watch from the sofa, thinking:
‘the light catches and frames perfect
each object: bread, knife, and Dante.’

August bends on the stoop, paying another
visit to my years, my fourth summer in New York.
I haven’t learnt the metropolitan tongue,
too provincial, I watch the hurtling line
of crumbs increase under the blade.

At home, some sea is ruining the reef.
At peace with this caress; no one
quarrels but the net that heaves back nothing
this finical year, the lone shark tears through
the haze like a jagged-edge train and brings me

to this hiatus, desolate and vexed;
same with Naso before your namesake, cast
away to another land—this is America, though;
trust the billboard’s promise, the offer of bread
from the mount of a stool, your Sinai.

My fate is stainless as the knife that parted
a friend’s wrist years ago, indigoed the clear
sand tourists visit to watch the sun vanish
into the bay, a metallic reoccurring soap opera
children leap slow to into the sun-rusted water.

The spill of yellow on the granite counter
is the sand of home minimized to amnesia,
friends dwindling like accounts, accounted
for in fragments, mentioned and forgotten
to the continent’s widening grasp.

America’s promise does not extend to Harlem.
The Renaissance blows like garbage in the street,
acid-eyed addicts stare through me, puzzled
at how still I stand in the vomit of people
coming from underground, blinking out light.

I don’t know how they escape Charon
and why they go back in the dozens,
to be unloaded on the moving blocks,
avenues that advertise panaceas
for their dark blues, their anxiety and hunger.

An ant takes a crumb on its black back.
Once more Sisyphus strains across the sink
to my sea, all our seas, but the single sea
of my point of view before knowing this world,
or you, salt flitting my eyes, admiring

the smile in the blade, the last yellow
piece to leave your hand. A riddling absence
fills me and the turn of the faucet brings
the flood, crumbs brushed into the gurgling hole,
pulling down from the window the summer light.

Other times we would try to sneak past
her perennial stare on the other tree.
She would catch us, and Kumina-talk: “Oui, kinte
pan you malu and tek back a boi fi me.”
And we would bring her ‘boi,’ the cigarette
she would light and smoke backwards,
sticking out an ash tongue before spitting
butt and phlegm at our toes. She would go on:
“Before the sea tek Gabby, I know;
I sit right here, to rass, and feel sand
in my ears. I feel my belly bottom sinking.

Then when my son Baba come tell me
him drown, I see him leaning on the nutmeg tree,
and I say, ‘Gabby, you not coming in?’
him smile, blowing short, bubbles
just a bust in him mouth. Could the man move?
No sir, him still like stone. Him right there,”
she would then point at the spotted tree,
blighted corneas thick and white on it,
“telling me when mango going to fall.”

My cousin, born February,
can’t read this apology signed
with two fishes: sorry for feeding you
the poison bread, a Roman deed.
Piscis Austrinus, you will meet
a water-bearer, sent to wash your feet,
she will dry them with her head cloth,
hold you like a mother—be her son,
cousin, so you will never want
for love, or feast, and you will learn
words for your hurt, to no longer
wonder at a coin’s face.

Rosemary

The woodcutter’s wife, sawdust hair.
I remember her footprints entering the grove—
I touched her and the beach shuddered.
I wanted to marry her on the leaves,
but the sky reflected in her eyes,
and I caught the silver glimpse of a far
jet, its engine thundered above the surf’s
breath. She pulled her blouse over her head
and her words splintered finer and finer
in the plane’s curling echo.

Floyd

Orthodox in daylight, at nightfall
this proselyte was the clean-shaved
emperor of Caesar's Go-Go Club,
star boy in his shiny shirt. His hands
greased mammoth collection plates
thrust into his face, pinky gold ring
glinting with their bosoms’ sheen.
In the half-shadow, in the scent of burnt
butts, processed hair, rummy lipstick,
an olive-branch sweat branded
his forehead. In the heave of bass-
line, he sunk low in the leather sofa,
ears thudding, a holy flock
of doves in his head.

Ezekiel

Seer of stones, madman praising
the sun in treetops, he cursed
the barbwire horizon and the three-wire
poles planted through his bush path.
I passed him there in his squalor,
son of Buzi in Babylon, vines rusting
on his head, two deserts for eyes,
soles parched where he sought salt
from the earth, walking
the full circle of the district.
Power cut nights, I heard his torn
voice from the Pentecostal hills,
singing us to sleep, singing:
when the roll when the roll
when the roll is called up yonder…