room, shore of a night so littered with fallen stars, your voice, a chapel of wood bathed in salt. cupping like chalices reverently our hands, love sounds holy, like ...
SUMMER EDWARD ———— Five Poems
Sugarcane Gone Love Remember when we inquired sweetly of the cane? The cane― burning the black flock of minims in petite careme childhoods, falling to rest on the bars of August’s symphony. The cane― we were possessed by the ritual of chewing, batons of sweetness cudgelled our submissive tongues, the erotic dominance of sap. Oh, the cane!― what was the year the ritual stopped? In what brief year the canes’ last fires burnt the bar and music broke, sweet waters dried, desires?
Landlines in African Literary Studies, ed. Gordon Collier (Matatu 47; Leiden & Boston MA: Brill | Rodopi, 2015).
SUMMER EDWARD
284
Sea Hut on this island of sorrow, a hut, your voice here, in the fading room, shore of a night so littered with fallen stars, your voice, a chapel of wood bathed in salt. cupping like chalices reverently our hands, love sounds holy, like death. sadly, we speak in tongues. floor of frayed teak, this closed night I tread across, follow your silhouette through doors that know the ceaseless longing of the sea. I hold up a candle to your grief, like Antoinette in her dream of the last, mad fire, your baptismal eyes gleam dark wet silt, silent ocean of light. I will leave with you tonight. we will make for the hut by the graveyards of sand. we will sleep together as waves lament.
Landlines in African Literary Studies, ed. Gordon Collier (Matatu 47; Leiden & Boston MA: Brill | Rodopi, 2015).
SUMMER EDWARD
285
To Fly the Way of Extinct Birds I want our love to be unstressed as syllables to the dactyl. To fly the way of extinct birds to the place where names are lost. & the poems that vanish like species, they leave their last bones at my window & the rattled are the dying. If you come up by the light my readiness is to believe you take me from the ossuaries that keep us kept & buried. Swift is the resurrection & deep the rapture of the uprising plumes yet the extinct birds are flying, yet the race burns. The hands
burst
into feathers that brush away
the world & the streak of the rising lovers fleeing after song.
Landlines in African Literary Studies, ed. Gordon Collier (Matatu 47; Leiden & Boston MA: Brill | Rodopi, 2015).
SUMMER EDWARD
286
The Deep Sometimes, it is like the sea, like the deep just open, gather you in from wild dominions where the Hours sleep. Deluding the night with the balneal moon in the deep not fract, in the place not known. Then lost in the reef of sunken days, in moiling groves of the esculent light: the rising susurrus of the waves. Get me out from stuporous caves, the mandible of the monstrous dream, Leviathan plowing the arboured sea. I want to go where the shore is wild, the tide intones to the humming star. But sometimes the sea just gather you in, plunge you down to the deep-sea chore and the Hours drowned in sunken graves where voices call in the deep descant. Downwelling sea! Far from the sandbar of the night, in what groined vaults the waters keep stirring up eternal light!
Landlines in African Literary Studies, ed. Gordon Collier (Matatu 47; Leiden & Boston MA: Brill | Rodopi, 2015).
SUMMER EDWARD
287
Seamen on Land I call you up from a sea of memory sad as blue coral, eyes, those fringeing caves, fathoms of ghost water in a young man’s face grown mermanish with the look of drowning. A young man’s grief so brittle yet full of clean echoes, boyhood’s ocean before shipwrecks of love still murmur in the hard branches of his hands grasping the hull of life. Young men, who wade through their years, dragging their life boats, shadow vessels, their tears you do not see until you have loved them, then too late. He will lug the ocean, anchorage to your shores, set it down within, the journey to unpack, until, flooded with brine, the world settles Bone and flesh into one sea blooming, the reef of love that forgets time, what young men once were. Only this underwater dream of when we first walked on land.
Landlines in African Literary Studies, ed. Gordon Collier (Matatu 47; Leiden & Boston MA: Brill | Rodopi, 2015).
