Going home means going to a place where everything seems to standstill.
Everything except death. He is always on the move.
You show up, and everything is as it was, but some people are no more. Even when you don’t show up, the news that so-and-so has died is as common as speaking about the weather.
It’s hot today!
Yes, is that we was talking about when I find out Moon dead.
True!
Yes, wi girl!
Death is a fact, an unwanted visitor who sometimes leaves you with interesting anecdotes of his dealings.
I might ask,
Wa happened to Mr. Stars, who use to play the off-key harmonica in church?
Only to be met with,
Oh! When the hurricane had pass, it did blow away his house, with him still in it.
A story, always a story, a tragedy told as a comedy even to the very end. With concern, I will ask.
Did he die?
As though the hidden humor in the response could only exist with a happy ending. My optimism mistaken for naivety, they will respond,
But of course! When de man whole roof blow way what you expect? You never see how meg he was then? De man never stand a chance. They find him next morning under a piece of galvanize.
The story ends. There is no more to it than that. It’s sad, but sad things happen. Unwanted guests show up all the time. And I suppose when you live in a place where everyone knows you or knows of you, to grieve every death is to be in a perpetual state of depression. It is to carry the burden of the world squarely on your shoulders, to take upon yourself the grief that shouldn’t accompany the loss of an uncle, cousin, sister, friend, next-door neighbor that used to live in Poor Man’s Corner.
Dealing with death says less about our resilience and more about the way our lives interconnect. They intertwine and rope together in the most unforeseen ways, like yarn on a knitting needle. It’s the equivalent of hearing that a celebrity has died. You’re potentially sad but ultimately unaffected. Knowing of someone does not make death a personal affair, and in that way, he is mentioned casually and often comically.
My personification of death must have started in high-school when I read Heather Royes’ poem “Death Came to See Me in Hot Pink Pants” …. and matching waistcoat too! It is a funny depiction, not solemn or grimm and yet in the second verse, there seems to be something otherworldly about someone laughing after failing to choke you out:
Death Came to See Me in Hot Pink Pants
Last night, I dreamt
that Death came to see me
in hot-pink pants
and matching waistcoat too.
He was a beautiful black saga boy.
Forcing open the small door of my wooden cage,
he filled my frame of vision
with a broad white smile,
and as he reached for my throat,
the pink sequins on his shoulders
winked at me.Last night, I dreamt
By: Heather Royes
that Death came to see me in hot-pink pants.
He was a beautiful black saga boy
and I hit him with a polished staff
of yellow wood,
and he went down.
But as he reached for me once more,
Laughing, laughing that saga boy laugh,
I awoke, holding myself,
unable to breathe.
How beautiful was Death
in hot-pink pants with matching waistcoat too.
A World of Poetry for CXC. The book where ideas weaved themselves into my mind and prompted further questions about the world we inhabited. I read such things as:
Because I could not stop for Death –
By: Emily Dickinson
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
Slightly morbid for the readings of a twelve-year-old, but for all the doom and gloom, being away from home still provokes a sense of nostalgia.
Being Dominican is not merely a title or a label or even a by-product of having a specific passport. It is a connection to a way of life. To view America through the eyes of an outsider all while standing indoors. To assimilate and integrate, yet be keenly aware of differences and oddities in what is now considered my current identity.
It’s odd to see the ocean outside of a thick green lush lens. To see the ocean and not smell salt. To walk parallel to bodies of water and not think of fish, or sea urchins or hermit crabs, or all the little things that make home home. And it isn’t necessarily that home is unique, but similar places do not invoke feelings of peace, of belonging, of attachment to this thing that one feels, defines them at their core.
I wish someone had told me earlier that rivers are called creeks here. A river here is nothing like the ones I know, but how does one explain a thing that already has a label. How to explain that I need it to be smaller and cleaner and safe to accidentally take a gulp of while swimming. That I need it to be cold but not freezing, that I need it to be somewhat hidden and yet popular enough to not be a secret.
Maybe this doesn’t make sense, but thanks to poetry, I am able to point to feelings. Speech, something I sometimes struggle with because the same words do not always mean the same thing. We have rivers. They have creeks. But they also have rivers, and what do I say when I don’t even know the word creek exists?
Baffling, but I find myself using terms with different connotations and thus different meanings altogether. Thankfully feelings, unlike speech, is easier to grasp. The poem below defines nostalgia for me.
I now feel what I thought the speaker must have felt when I sat reading this in Ms. Edward’s English B class at NECS. A school where the windows were always unhinged because of the salt that wafted in on the sea breeze. Salt you tasted in the constant sweat on your brow because AC was not a concept that existed outside of the principal’s office. For me, high school is a collection of short stories that I’m sure I shall recount later, but for now, and through this poem, take a walk with me.
You may not exactly understand, or feel what I feel, but the words here are lovely and graphic enough to paint a picture of someplace new.
South
But today I recapture the islands’
bright beaches: blue mist from the ocean
rolling into the fishermen’s houses.
By these shores I was born: sound of the sea
came in at my window, life heaved and breathed in me then
with the strength of that turbulent soil.Since then I have travelled: moved far from the beaches:
sojourned in stoniest cities, walking the lands of the north
In sharp, slanting sleet and the hail,
crossed countless saltless savannas and come
to this house in the forest where the shadows oppress me
and the only water is rain and the tepid taste of the river.We who are born of the ocean can never seek solace
in rivers: their flowing runs on like our longing,
reproves us our lack of endeavour and purpose,
proves that our striving will founder on that.
We resent them this wisdom, this freedom: passing us
toiling, waiting and watching their cunning declensions down to the sea.But today I would join you, travelling river,
borne down the years of your paintiest flowing,
past pains that would wreck us, sorrows arrest us,
hatred that washes us up on the flats;
and moving on through the plains that receive us,
processioned in tumult, come to the sea.Bright waves splash up from the rocks to refresh us,
blue sea-shells shift in their wake
and there is the thatch of the fishermen’s houses, the path
made of pebbles, and look!
small urchins combing the beaches
look up from their traps to salute us:
they remember us just as we left them.The fisherman, hawking the surf on this side
Poet: Kamau Brathwaite
of the reef, stands up in his boat
and halloos us: a starfish lies in its pool.
And gulls, white sails slanted seaward,
fly into limitless morning before us.
