Canal Water

Muddy, endless, every building’s beaten wood
laid slatternly, every mossy bridge post broken,
blistered walkways through fierce grass sentries
and winsome mud, elegaic mud that sings
of lost shoes, the sea smell of the canal
and the sea stone sluice in the distance,
stubborn along a grey horizon.

Now that the canals flow again,
there are shoals of fish to be caught
by bare, mud-singed children,
there are stolid collections of snails
near the water and long beaked birds
as the canal water strobes past,
reflecting low-hanging mangoes and cashew trees
buoying their puckered fruit toward God.
A horde of jewelled blue dragonflies bless the water
on their way to the interior.

This is home, my mother’s eyes say with smile creases,
and the hurried step of a young girl
into the creaking foyer, her hand on the brass doorknob.
Here was Grandma and Grandpa’s room, and this was the kitchen
where the pressure cooker exploded and cracked the roof,
this was the dark alcove painted white where she slept –
“Was it really so small?” –
and I am incredulous that she lived in a closet,
then we discuss how treacherous the floor sounds
and how no paint can help these purpleheart walls
and how unsafe the current tenant must feel.
I say the words demolish it and I see the small child
inside my mother’s eyes stop skipping and ask
for her grandfather’s calm hand to steady her.
His house cannot speak for him,
but the wind screams through the roof.

 

 

Sargassum

i – afraid
It happened quickly. Her mind crashed,
a waves’ wild petaled edge onto sand
in Mayaro, unfurling whip-hard,
frothing and furious, throbbing
along with the tide until she was limp

ii – hold your breath
Then, under. Buoyed by the red mass
of shifting, silent weight. Nothing is clear.
Wrapped languid, the pulse eased into
soft touches and symmetry. The sargassum bleeds.

iii – insensate
Acres and acres of self and ten feet
of salt. You are made drunk by the
dominance of an ocean’s flesh
on your grains of sand

iv – convulsions of hypoxia
There is something in the water, they say.
You are not yourself, we cannot leave scorched land
just to live like fish. The seaweed has grown you new ears
What you hear is salt, and bloody.
Why not drown here?

v – post mortem
Sea has no branch. When the red wet
weed feeds your soft muck, and you
cannot think how to light on land, remember.
The sea’s burden grows beyond bearing,
cracked ribs of coral bleached and feeding
fresh on plastic.

What is land? What is air and
what is sea water? They all sting
her eyes. We all drown.

 

∝

Desirée Seebaran is a Trinidadian writer and editor. She is an alum of the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop for Writers (2010) and the inaugural Moko Magazine Poetry Masterclass (2018). Her poem ‘Picong’ won the 2019 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for poetry, and she was awarded the 2021 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize.