Poems

How can I miss what I've never had?

How can I miss what I've never had?

How can I hear what wasn't said?

How can I see what's not visible?

How can I say without speaking?

How can I feel without a touch or experience?

Why does it feel like I've been there when I haven't?

How can I go where I don't know?

How can I know what wasn't made known? These things are only possible the same way I find clarity at the core of chaos.

- PGW

Teach us to

number our days

Dangers lurking all around us

Earthly stalwarts fall one by one

Like the grass that now surrounds us

Few short days and then they're gone

See how finite those that charm us

Like vapour on a misty day

Their breath fails, how it alarms us

With the wind they're swept away

O mighty God so all embracing

You alone deserve our praise

Help us O God all self-effacing

To number these our few short days

- Errington Johnson

Jamaica

Jamaica, the country I long for

The country I love

My heart belongs to you.

Oh! How I love you Jamaica

I miss you, and your wonderful people with their great sense of humour, the rivers, the mountains, the streams.

Oh, the beauty of Jamaica - I love you so

Could I but turn back the clock

I never would have left you.

Jamaica, my love my heart longs for you

Why, oh why did you let me go?

- Verna Williams

Land of Wood and Water

Although her tears fell

The cracks enlarged

'Just a sip she cries,

my tongue is parched'.

At nights her air perspire

to quench the thirst

By day her crust exfoliate

As the drought gets worst.

Her farmers they struggle

To minimise decay

Of crops on life support,

slowly withering away.

So price lost patience

and took to the sky

Like a kite on the loose

To fall it needs to fly.

Her many people are told

It can only get better

If the wood is maintained,

and they conserve water.

But frustration creeps in

at regular supply's absence

Weekly rations have to be

Enough for daily cleanse.

- Janice Menzies

***

Vulnerability

We slow-walk our perilous slopes of desires silently, evading gravity - yet woe are we, rising between heaven and gaping hell - each skyward climb, increasing scope between joy and gaping hell.

- Homer Sylvester

My path

Shadows of sadness walk closely behind my smile

Can't you leave me alone just for a while?

Your bright smile answers my question as darkness turns into day

Directions of the ways to acceptance on every corner

Yet proudly I walk on the straight path

The lonely path but the path that feels so right

The world scattered on the sidewalks as they choose the paths of acceptance

Dark skin I embrace it not a ounce of rejection I give it

Taken a back by the constant increase of hatred on the path I've not chosen

I walk alone but my smile gets brighter

No constant pains of refusal from the paths that I have rejected

I walk the path of life alone but I have my own acceptance

Shadows of rejection follow behind but the light I see that awaits me at the end of my journey

- Saccheen Laing

***

Real Duppies 'Sonnet'

Believe it or not,

Duppy is a real somebody

you can hide all you want

but the truth must come out one way or the other

I am no medium (by any analysis)

but it is the living truth,you can't hide no crime

nor cover it up,I don't care if it takes a million years

There will be even more sophisticated instruments than DNA

you may not think it can affect you now

but then what about the afterlife?

and that I think is real

it is just on another level

don't think there isn't an influence one way or the other

the clue you hide will be a bother, brother.

- Helen-Ann Elizabeth Wilkinson