Cast Iron

 

your children are not your property

but try telling that to Caribbean women

who’s own skin was made thick

from their mother’s hands

 

the women who taught them how to love

through leather

through the swing of a belt

charged with the energy of a baptist woman’s worship

 

each blow charged with the spirit

a kinetic gospel

shaped in praise breaks and holy wailing

the dance of deliverance in a Sunday service

 

the Caribbean knows how to hold hurt

its soil is thick with things unsaid

so many jaw lines disappear in the silence

children who go to heaven before they die

 

washed pale by the fight that lives in fists

in the mouths of Venus flytraps

in post-colonial echoes

that bark orders without question

 

like proof

that people cannot be owned

and that not everything that survives

should be passed down

 

 

Instructions for Forgiving a Ghost

 

start by saying his name without flinching

let it sit in your mouth like hot coal

until it no longer tastes like poison

 

do not lie

he was not kind

he did not stay

he did not try

 

but he was someone’s child once

carried someone else’s wounds

before he made yours

 

forgiveness isn’t forgetting

it’s learning to remember

without bleeding

without breaking your banks

 

so write his name on paper

fold it and place it in your pocket

not to carry him

but to carry yourself without shame

 

 

 

All the Good Things

 

August sun stretches its golden mouth

a river lime runneth over

Tobago strolls, with hands lingering too long in public

the Caroni plains undress in the heat

hibiscus honey lips, a prayer I repeat

 

tropical depression hums soft

and the morning, a hymn

glows clean after the rain’s retreat

 

a pot pops kernel-corn joy

old movies flicker like whispers

Chance the Rapper calls out into the multiverse

the bassline cocooning us

 

cocoon unraveling our naval strings

Ramen noodles twisting on chopsticks

starch mango fibre toothy grins

wide as the Queen’s Park Savannah

wildflowers at their edge

the poui trees bloom like declarations, soft and sudden

 

eyes meet like a silent gospel in passing

no tally of “I love you” is ever enough

but it’s a start

a place of being we return to again and again

 

 

∞

Deneka Thomas is an award-winning spoken word poet, writer, arts educator, activist and media practitioner based in Trinidad and Tobago. They were crowned the Grand Slam Champion of the First Citizens National Poetry Slam in 2018.