Antony Joseph

SEWE WANGALA (A KALENDA)
- first part -

Sewe wangala bondye ba-mwen, woy
(God, hide the wanga for me)

robber man don’t get me
don’t blow me out down
town
down shantytown
ravine
wey they beat silver fish
and wabeen
on the east dry river
riverbank.

we come like ripe
guava when it season
full it ripe
and it drop like
a 12 gauge shot that shatt-
er the rain soakt wings
of our mountain gods.

young blood seep up on the sea and float foam
from brain coral
where my brother reel
reel so reel that the paddle broke
and tumble down
cliff and stony crocus bound
with the snakeskin mask and the kid-
nap bush hid in Orinoco navel string
robber man don’t lock my neck round
Piarco airport
roundabout

island
is my
in-
stance
geographical
silence of my innermost

      hide
  the
ma
gic
 for
 me

robber boy don’t make mud clog the tracks I cross river bank
 don’t sell my eyes for sand puppet teeth
       don’t seed my seppy for ransom
         don’t brug my neck with fisherman’s twine
           don’t scope my ruse with barbed river time
             don’t fix my suffer with jumbie symposium
               don’t grief my root with rumours of wounds

comecomecome
le we pounce on wild quenk and gouti
make we shuffle in the jungles
of port
of spain
le we
lime

spic and span a comin
spic and span mama
hide the magic
form.
e.

wanga: magical fighting stick
wabeen: A small ravine fish

THE CINEMA
Frizzle neck chickens pick padlocks under the cinema
midday Saturday when it hot in the cob
and that chicken shit buzz from the chopping board                                                                         when man watchin’ Chen Sing kick-up.
 
In the cinema the ground build tilt, the wall shaky-shaky
sound bounce round like few hundred radio
tumbling down.
The film stock zog-up zog-up
(like chicken scratch it)
It jagged and it bruise
when man watching Shoalin Temple.

And the soundtrack get contaminate
with taxi horn an’ bicycle engine,
the market shout and the dub wax pump –
the heifers in the abattoir bawling.

The pie mans slapping palm.
Every coconut head that slash.
Each cuss an’ cut an’ planass pass
get mix with the Wong Fan death-grip,                                                                                      drunken sleeping crane, 
the monkey wrist, the praying mantis.

But the screen heng like curtain that twist
an’ kick missing instep
like chicken missing neck.

planass: to strike with the flat part of a cutlass

excerpt from THE MYST

My brother become the myst that night. He put his boots on.
(just out of reach is a long way to stretch, outsider status no string vest).
He fixed his mask. He slid a brittle edged gilpin cutlass into the sleeve he pullt from his belt. Under arm grip his cow itch pouch and he ran through the bush upper Kandahar hill.

(Joy juice that do it.)

He had been planning this arrival since May. And now his bulk was proper. His gullet root tough. For months I watched, when he let me, and when he didn’t, see me peep, as he assembled his implements. For the suit he dyed and synthesized
tarpaulin|pure black with sandbox root, his  gloves he proofed with banga seed heart,
his jackboot steel he sanded off sheen. Bacano milk did his dada head:dread. The mask made last with perforated pigskin leather, waxed and mold on his sleeping head, with shallow holes for hooks and eyes

I saw him churn ol’iron on the riverbank morning, then he swam under floodgate
with a single column of breath and came back with handfuls of armoured cascadura. He drunk duck egg, nog and cowheel porridge till the muscle to leap in his legs grew across the width of one of five rivers. His cryptic grip was wire bent, his speed through jungle: elastic. His cutlass slap would spin heads around. His battle stance was brute and bad minded. Sudden so he get grim&snarling when he put his suit on, and he mount the steep incline like a lizard.

Caribbean Haiku

By hurricane candlelight
her calloused fingers thread
         - a needle

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