rivers
(by rajiv mohabir)
i. ganga
i do not know leather work,
the back break of cane;
i never whetted grandfather’s
cutlass nor kirpan.
i never uddered cows, churned
milk into yogurt to soothe—
my back never rose rubies from
lash tracks tracing ship routes back
around that cape where
good hope failed us.
my navel could never berth
vishnu’s lotus,
i could not crack the skulls
of our incinerating dead
to guide grandmother’s soul
into a new body.
- corentyne
what a soul remembers.
my face sticky from berbice—
stolen mangoes from papa’s neighbor,
a home held together
with hay, mud, bottom-house—
the first time i saw the milky way
it broke speckles on the river’s face.
gleaming back-dam sun jewels:
a brilliant singsong in voice,
akash-ganga constellations on this body.
this body is earth, star, pitch, straw,
is a house of four continents.
iii. thames
my fair lady spit on my mother,
split her eyebrow into a trickling pink
silk slick shining on pavement grey. she lay
in a pooling a sari plait in queen’s country.
go home paki
she could not pleat cemented blood
into a sari, nor recall what’s long dried
to flow in her veins. how could she exhume
a riverbed of parched bhojpuri bones—
go home paki
english national front and ma sailed
english; tucked me in her creole cotton.
paki go home
i am from queen’s country,
show me the way home.
- econolockhatchee
tannin browned stream,
i bathed in this river.
i am a pot—wholly of this clay,
filled heavy with its tea.
at fourteen i learned the truth.
whelps dog into rebel flags,
tree coons, hunt fags.
i did not play inside his house,
but drank from his outside hose,
more than once he gripped
my pine. more than once,
he jammed me, in southern baptist
conviction, into steel lockers.
brown fairy bitch, go
back where you came from
he followed me home that night
bat in his hands, my skull still
in one chuluota piece.
- hudson
kettle drum barrage, i beat tassa
down broadway, in hymn,
in rain, a ghost ship him.
Her Majesty’s forgotten
son never sets on haldi fingers,
on chutney lips, never sets on liberty
avenue bangle clink. a song,
home spun into sinew, into five
generations gone. ss jura’s boardgrooves
curl the kalapani strain
onto mast of muscle, of bone;
woven into a sail cloth smooth,
i am sailing. now, i am sailing.
