Safiya Sinclair Poems

Father unbending father unbroken father
with the low-hanging belly, father I was cleaved from,
pressed into, cast and remolded, father I was forged
in the fire of your self. Ripped my veined skin, one eyelid,
father my black tangle of hair and teeth. Born yellowed
and wrinkled, father your jackfruit, foster my overripe flesh.
Father your first daughter now severed at the ankles, father
your black machete. I remember your slick smell, your sea-dark,
your rum-froth, wailed and smeared my wet jelly across
your cheek. Father forgive my impossible demands. I conjure you
in woven tam, Lion of Judah, Father your red, gold,
and green. Father a flag I am waving/father a flag I am burning.
Father skittering in on a boat of whale skeleton,
his body wrapped in white like an Orthodox priest. Father
and his nest of acolyte women, his beard-comber, his Primrose,
his Dahlia, his Nagasaki blossom. Mother and I were none of them.
Father washing me in eucalyptus, in garlic, in goldenseal.
Fathering my exorcism. Father the harsh brine of my sea.
Making sounds only the heart can feel. Father a burrowing
insect, his small incision. No bleat but a warm gurgle -
Daughter entering this world a host. Father your beached animal,
your lamentations in the sand. Mother her red bones come knocking.
Mother her red bones come knocking at the floorboards,
my mother knock-knocking at his skull when he dreams.
Scratching at your door, my dry rattle of Morse code:
Father Let me in. With the mash-mouth spirits who enter us,
Father the split fibula where the marrow must rust -
Father the soft drum in my ear. Daughter unweeding
her familiar mischief. Mother jangling the ribcage: I am here.
...

Out here the surf rewrites our silences.
This smell of ocean may never leave me;
our humble life or the sea a dark page

I am trying to turn: Today my mother's words
sound final. And perhaps this is her first true thing.
Her hands have not been her hands

since she was twelve,
motherless and shucking whatever the sea
could offer, each day orphaned in the tide

of her own necessity - where the men-o-war
ballooned, wearing her face, her anchor of a heart
reaching, mooring for any blasted thing:

sea-roach and black-haired kelp, jeweled perch
or a drop of pearl made with her smallest self,
her night-prayers a hushed word of thanks.

But out here the salt-depths refuse tragedy.
This hand-me-down life burns sufficiently tragic -
here what was cannibal masters the colonial

curse, carved our own language of the macabre,
sucking on the thumb of our own disparity. Holding
her spliff in the wind, she probes and squalls,

trying to remember the face of her own mother,
our island, or some strange word she once found
amongst the filth of sailors whose beds she made,

whose shoes she shined, whose guns
she cleaned, while the white bullet of America
ricocheted in her brain. Still that face she can't recall

made her chew her fingernails, scratch the day down
to its blood, the rusty sunset of this wonder,
this smashed archipelago. Our wild sea grape kingdom

overrun, gold and belonging in all its glory
to no one. How being twelve-fingered she took her father's
fishing line to the deviation, and starved

of blood what grew savage and unwanted. Pulled
until they shriveled away, two hungry mouths
askance and blooming, reminding her

that she was still woman always multiplying
as life's little nubs and dreams came bucking up
in her disjointed. How on the god-teeth

she cut this life, offered her hands and vessel
to be made wide, made purposeful,
her body opalescent with all our clamoring,

our bloodline of what once lived
and will live and live again.
In the sea's one voice she hears her answer.

Beneath her gravid belly
my gliding hull
a conger eel.
...

Caribbean thyme is ten times stronger than the English variety - just ask Miss Queenie and her royal navy, who couldn't yank a Jamaican weed from her rose-garden that didn't grow back thick, tenfold, and blackened with the furor of a violated man. The tepid American I sank with my old shoes over the jaws of the Atlantic could never understand the hard clamor of my laugh, why I furrowed rough at the brow, why I knew the hollow points of every bone. But dig where the soil is wet and plant the proud seed of your shame-tree; don't let them say it never grew. Roll the saltfish barrel down the hill, sending that battered thunder clanging at the seaside moon, jangled by her long earrings at our sea, ten times bluer than the bluest eye. That mint tea whistling in the Dutch pot is stronger than liquor, and takes six spoons of sugar, please - what can I say, my great-grandfather's blood was clotted thick with sugar cane and overproof rum; when he bled it trickled heavy like molasses, clotted black like phlegm in the throat. Every red ant from Negril to Frenchman's Cove came to burrow and suckle at his vein, where his leg was honeyed with a diabetic rot, and when he caught my grandmother in his wide fishing net, he served her up cold to his wild-eyed son: "Mermaid on the deck."
...

The word ‘cannibal,' the English variant of the Spanish word canibal, comes from the word caribal, a reference to the native Carib people in the West Indies, who Columbus thought ate human flesh, and from whom the word ‘Caribbean' originated. By virtue of being Caribbean, all ‘West Indian' people are already, in a purely linguistic sense, born savage.
...

Have I forgotten it -
wild conch-shell dialect,

black apostrophe curled
tight on my tongue?

Or how the Spanish built walls
of broken glass to keep me out

but the Doctor Bird kept chasing
and raking me in: This place

is your place, wreathed in red
Sargassum, ancient driftwood

nursed on the pensive sea.
The ramshackle altar I visited

often, packed full with fish-skull,
bright with lignum vitae plumes:

Father, I have asked so many miracles
of it. To be patient and forgiving,

to be remade for you in some
small wonder. And what a joy

to still believe in anything.
My diction now as straight

as my hair; that stranger we've
long stopped searching for.

But if somehow our half-sunken
hearts could answer, I would cup

my mouth in warm bowls
over the earth, and kiss the wet dirt

of home, taste Bogue-mud
and one long orange peel for skin.

I'd open my ear for sugar cane
and long stalks of gungo peas

to climb in. I'd swim the sea
still lapsing in a soldered frame,

the sea that again and again
calls out my name.
...

This is where you leave me.
Filling of old salt and ponderous,

what's left of your voice in the air.
Blue honeycreeper thrashed out

to a ragged wind, whole months
spent crawling this white beach

raked like a thumb, shucking, swallowing
the sea's benediction, pearled oxides.

Out here I am the body invented naked,
woman emerging from cold seas, herself

the raw eel-froth met beneath her tangles,
who must believe with all her puckering

holes. What wounds the Poinciana slits
forth, what must turn red eventually.

The talon-mouths undressing. The cling-cling
bird scratching its one message; the arm

you broke reset and broke again. Caribbean.
Sky a wound I am licking, until I am drawn new

as a lamb, helpless in the chicken wire of my sex.
I let every stranger in. Watch men change faces

with the run-down sun, count fires
in the loom-holes of their pickups, lines of rot,

studying their scarred window-plagues,
nightshade my own throat closed tight

against a hard hand. Then all comes mute
in my glittering eye. All is knocked back,

slick hem-suck of the dark surf, ceramic
tiles approaching, the blur of a beard.

The white tusk of his ocean goring me.
This world unforgiving in its boundaries.

The day's owl and its omen
slipping a bright hook

into my cheek —
...

The mind's black kettle hisses its wild
exigencies at every turn: The hour before the coffee
and the hour after.

Penscratch of the gone morning, woman
a pitched hysteria watching the mad-ant scramble,
her small wants devouring.

Her binge and skin-thrall.
Her old selves being shuffled off into labyrinths,
this birdless sky a longing.

Her moth-mouth rabble unfacing
touch-and-go months under winter, torn letters
under floorboards,

each fickle moon pecked through with doubt.
And one spoiled onion. Pale Cyclops
on her kitchen counter

now sprouting green missives,
some act of contrition; neighbor-god's vacuum
a loud rule thrown down.

Her mother now on the line saying too much.
This island is not a martyr. You tinker too much
with each gaunt memory, your youth

and its unweeding. Not everything blooms here
a private history — consider this immutable. Consider
our galloping sun, its life.

Your starved homesickness. The paper wasp kingdom
you set fire to, watched for days until it burnt a city in you.
Until a family your hands could not save

became the hurricane. How love is still unrooting you.
And how to grow a new body — to let each word be the wild rain
swallowed pure like an antidote.

Her mother at the airport saying don't come back.
Love your landlocked city. Money. Buy a coat.
And even exile can be glamorous.

Some nights she calls across the deaf ocean to no one
in particular. No answer. Her heart's double-vault
a muted hydra.

This hour a purge

of  its own unselfing.
She must make a home of it.
...

White is a state of mind. Spangled. Blinding,
Shining sky awash in all its shining. White arms
Spread wide claimed she was friendly, cried she was
Mighty, then tracked her mud across my shore,
Gilded lamp lifting to hawk a fantasy. Eyes torched
Dark with snake-oil, heeled vision burnt in blood,
In blood ransacked what hungered me, then built
A fence that voids me still. Mother, illegal, Mother-in-exile,
Spurned unworthy, told "Go back to your country," Mother
Still yearning to breathe. Free. Been tired, been poor,
Been wretched, barricaded, huddled mass 'cross stolen
Centuries, undocumenting liberty. Goodbye to all of that.
World-born-wrong, how freedom preens red-throated
From your jail. Here lies her empty. Here lies her brass
Corona, her rusted. Colossus drowned under artless seas.
I, too, will miss America.
...

Only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.

—W. B. Yeats, "For Anne Gregory"



Sister, there was nothing left for us.
Down here, this cast-off hour, we listened
but heard no voices in the shells. No beauty.

Our lives already tangled in the violence of our hair,
we learned to feel unwanted in the sea's blue gaze,
knowing even the blond lichen was considered lovely.

Not us, who combed and tamed ourselves at dawn,
cursing every brute animal in its windy mane—
God forbid all that good hair being grown to waste.

Barber, I can say a true thing or I can say nothing;
meet you in the canerows with my crooked English,
coins with strange faces stamped deep inside my palm,

ask to be remodeled with castaway hair, or dragged
by my scalp through your hot comb. The mirror takes
and the mirror takes. I've waded there and waited in vanity;

paid the toll to watch my wayward roots foam white,
drugstore formaldehyde burning through my skin.
For good hair I'd do anything. Pay the price of dignity,

send virgins in India to daily harvest; their miles
of glittering hair sold for thousands in the street.
Still we come to them yearly with our copper coins,

whole nights spent on our knees, our prayers whispered
ear to ear, hoping to wake with soft unfurling curls,
black waves parting strands of honey.

But how were we to know our poverty?
That our mother's good genes would only come to weeds,
that I would squander all her mulatta luck.

This nigger-hair my biggest malady.
So thick it holds a pencil up.
...

February, I am an open wound—woman discarded
and woman emerging. Scars devising scars.
To live here we know precisely how to be haunted.
Sundown sun, a sterile sky come running,
sweet gallow-grass whistling; Ghosts.
All year we learn that chainsaw hymnal, outside the Lawn,
another excavation—slave quarters found concealed
in the student dorms; buried rooms choked, sounds
bricked off. Two centuries' thorns may break sudden bloom.
What can we say? No one speaks of it. I dream pristine.
And skirting the caution-tape instead, we clasp hands
with each other in complicity.

Somewhere, the ghost-arm of history
still throttling me. This taste of old blood on the wind,
the crouched statue of Sacajawea shrouded behind the pioneers.
Creature of unbelonging, unname a new silence.
Magnolia explosion, its Leviathan shade.
Then fall, what sick messiah. Fall, I am coughing in
the aisles again, where bare triage of voices pour molasses in
my ear. Where a bald insurrection of tongues. Then
squashed rebellion, scrutiny. Indoctrination.
To live here we know precisely how to be hunted.
...