|
Roger Bonair-Agard Page 3
Our bodies are made of stars
A molecular cloud, sometimes
called a stellar nursery if
star formation
is occurring within, is a type of
interstellar cloud
whose density and size permits the formation of
molecules.
Wikipedia
I’m going back to Brooklyn, the
stacks
and stacks of houses stacked on
houses
the police cameras mounted on tree
houses
mid-hood, the youths’ heads all
davening
to one massive downbeat, always
deconstructing
in their bodies every molecule of
sound
so that they make of their bodies
a re-imagined God when they burst
anew with re-strung energy.
I’m going back to Laventille, the
shacks
stacked precarious on a North
Trinidad hillside,
where you can hear at every moment
culture being born and born again in
steel,
in the rumble deep inside an old oil
drum, a new chrome – making sound
of a re-designed anger. You can
hear the boom
of automatic gunfire, the slide of
chamber
the unmistakable smell of sooted
steel
here too. That is sometimes how we
burst, kept tight under the pressure
of some
inter stellar force swirling around
us
and then we are…
Astronomers today believe that a
large
fraction of the atoms inside our
bodies
were once stars, that became
supernovae
that were then launched into the
universe
when these stars exploded. They’re
half
right. But they don’t know how we
turn
right back around and make the
universe
when we explode – when we emerge
from cloud and doubt, new and fiery
with outrage, with languages
these larger bodies cannot decipher
In La Horqueta Trinidad, a housing
project
(we call them schemes in Trinidad)
which moved people from enclaves
with names like
John-John and Never Dirty, starts
at the main highway and moves
section
by section (called phases) deep
towards
bush, in places named Talparo
and Brazil, the sort of villages
named by people the city councils
couldn’t bother
to grace with running water
or electricity, and in Phase 6 down
where we were afraid to venture
even in 1987, when we were young
and unafraid, we once saw a man
with no teeth, blunted higher than
an interstellar medium, do things
with a ball, barefoot, in a La
Horqueta league
football game – which games often
ended in gunfight – which moved
us to proclaim him the greatest
footballer we had ever
seen – this league in which national
players came when they wanted to be
anointed as real, as stars among
stars
forming and burning out right here
in Phase 6 La horqueta – and in
which
a man barefoot, gave no thought
to the cleats of his opponents and
scored
at will. The poet has been saying
for years, warning really
that we’ve got niggas with wings
and stars for limbs in the most
unlikely
places. We’re making the world.
Wouldn’t you like to be in it
and made of star matter, of new
and shooting brilliant gas, made of
us?!
The poet has a poem to write.
He is obsessed with language.
He is obsessed with what words
put under pressure might yield.
He is lucky in this pursuit of meta-
meaning. He is in a business
which allows him metaphor.
The research says he must holler
at something called a
young
stellar object.
Some days, the blackness
writes itself . Naturally
a young stellar object hangs
out in a
stellar nursery
in its earliest stages of evolution.
Stay with me: the YSOs
cuz we stay signifying like this
are divided into
massive intermediate
masses
and brown
dwarfs.
Sometimes
the blackness…
I’m going back to Brooklyn
to Biggie Smalls, a bridge for sale,
to Michael Jordan’s birthplace,
to No Sleep till…
to the afternoon a 12 year old
dunked
on me in a playground in
Bedford-Stuyvesant
back when white people asked me
if I wasn’t scared to live there
and I answered
No, I’m scared
of you,
who drag black bodies
to rivers, who hang neighborhood
interlopers, who fifteen years later
moves in to the center of the
starburst
I made my goddamned self and calls
it Stuyvesant Heights. Fuck you!
I’M the stellar one, been under
pressure and making explosion after
explosion out of the clouds and into
the universe. I’M the star-builder.
La Horqueta, Laventille or Brooklyn,
this is where the pressure lives,
where
our bodies learn to streak blue-hot,
where we move from stardust to
trigger-finger to supernova again.
Wouldn’t you like to learn how
to be a part of how you get to be
whole? To meet God?
To be born again?
--
The Gospel according to Trinity Street
(Book 20)
He has said his
morning
prayers. He has had a simple meal – tea from the yard to fight the little cough he feels coming, picked early, dew still on the leaves – dark still unmoving from the dirt. The wife has risen with him, though they sleep in different rooms now, and though she not so brisk in the kitchen any more she still fries up the sausage nice nice and her bread when hot is still a little bit of Jesus when the butter steam on it. All the khakis, all the shirt jacs hanging in the closet are already pressed - she does all that on a Saturday so he just pulls a shirt out, white crisp, starched over the merinho tucks the khaki pants into some tall boots and goes to see about the cocoa. It is still a dull, steel gray in the sky when he leaves with a flat and a brushing cutlass inside a crocus bag wrap up and heads towards Tamana. He thinks it is nearly time for the boy, his grandson, to learn about this land. But for now let him sleep. Let him study his book. He is still young. He must yet be taught and churched by the women. The taxi man is the same one he gets most days he heads to Tamana so they exchange one or two pleasantries, Morning, how you do? Look like it set up to rain. How the children? How the garden? But the old man has never been talkative so it is mostly silent till Grande where he will change for a next taxi to go up in the bush. This morning the cocoa ripe some men are already harvesting so he make himself busy instead with clearing the brush underneath. He begins immediately but takes his time. You must be brisk but you never have to rush when you clearing your own land. The long handled cutlass swipes clumps of grass from right near his feet, whistles a perfect arc back into the air and comes round again in a perfect circle to swipe the next clump held in place with the crook stick in the left hand. This certain circle repeats for more times than he can possibly count, and as it does, he hums songs soft in his head, mostly hymns, chuckles from time to time to remember something the boy said. He is bright and strong that boy even though he thinks they let his hair grow too wild. Without looking at his watch he knows it is twelve o'clock and time to stop; has cleared brush from the road all the way back to the river where the land descends into a soft reddish mud. Here it is cool. The shady immortelle even more plentiful here. He unwraps a pristine kerchief, soaks it in a brook, and presses it against the back of his neck and wipes down his face. It is here he knows the land best. It is the only moment of which he tells no-one, not even Father in confession. He has something to leave for the grandchildren. It is his 81st birthday and he will work the land till he can walk it no more. This is the only place he has ever allowed himself to cry.
© Copyright, 2013,
Roger Bonair-Agard . |