My cement tongue
Makes a mockery of
My mother tongue
My accent now is store bought
Milk carton white
Baldwin, Elmira, Linden
Incised in suburbia
my Aunt's house
So close to my birthplace
Yet so displaced
my cousins speaking fluent patois
Tongues strolling through the
Stressed and unstressed syllables
One of these is not like the other
My patois is an old friend turned enemy(?)
She is the love i have for a country i never want to live in
I can only see her when the lights are off
She stands in the corner of my room
Of my mind
Lying in wait
She creeps across the floor,
waiting to sink in her nails, her teeth
take bites out of my flesh
For i have left her to starve
Once when were were young
She had brown skin with sunset undertones
Black wool hair
It's matted now, unwashed
Her cheeks sunken in
skin rough and ashy, white flakes peeling
Like the skin underneath a cast
And she smells of rotting wood
She lunges at me, but i push her back
And she scuttles away, into the corner of the room
Her face is a melody of fear, grief and rage
(She speaks the patois of the rural areas, incomprehensible to non-Jamaicans. I have translated it into standard english here:)
"You left me! You use me when you like, to give your cousins a laugh. Then you abandon me for months, years. I grow mad with boredom, my hands pare my skin for want of work. You have learned the language of ghosts, you have forgotten me."
My eyes swell with tears.
How can I tell her that I love her?
I have missed her so much
I have missed the heat of the land
The breeze
The cherry tree in my grandmother's backyard
The sound of the word veranda
Even the hurricanes, the cleansing of the air
I miss that almond tree
I miss crushing the pods with blocks of cement
Opening them up and eating it straight
I want to go back to that island
Hold the land close to me
Tell it that i have not forgotten
I tell her that I have missed her.
But here, no one knew her
I have no use of her
She lets me hold her
And we cry
I lay her down
kiss her forehead
When i return she will be a ghost
Gone to join the millions in this land
The land of ghosts is calling me
And I have no choice but to return
