I have a poem I am working on for a poetry competition, and I think I’m almost done (it’s a more edited version of ‘First Draft’). I want to post it on here for you all to read- and this is where my favour comes in: would you be able to tell me if you understand it? Of course, feel free to critique or offer suggestions, but I just want to make sure- if my poem is selected to read out to an audience- that people get it. PLEEEEEASE?! Thank you!! :)
“Tepid dawn of ancestral virtues”
- Aimé Césaire
I
At the spearhead of dawn
Bitter seeds of speech used to be indigenous like lavender when lips from old civilisations enraptured the history of long-winded oceans; and were sagacious when old light crippled over mountainous frailties; and would serenade the inflammation of an ancestral dance a phallus nigger used to do
until some of that light descends on a continent
that was never there
a regressed continent of livestock
superstitions
wild beds of twigs
shallow entrails disguised as impromptu delicacies
flamingos that explode into pigments of bright air
detonating into life from the potency of torrent rivers.
II
Today, it is quite formidable for anyone to regress from rhetoric
as it was for young, adolescent, back-alley foreplay.
I have never possessed the instincts
for Western themed surprises.
But infringements on a family of 10 under a corrugated roof shack, from the English colonial hum-drum, I know would be guised behind some model, populous fable in a Wiltshire corner shop
whilst two decedent, afrocentric, yellow-orphan niggers transcend their twelve other October/February relatives from the bark of a stable tree-
now how can I ignore that shit when I’m still alive?!
This discarding of any theatre or contempt for the Third World…
how can I merchandise that shit so that we might strip them back to the phallic stage
and scorn them
and think ‘how wonderful’
slurring from the bottle-heads of our fixated, macabre inflictions
so that even during the day
it would feel somewhat right to bastardise some ancestral fears that are no longer synonymous with the reunification of prejudice
to elate the irritable, shuffling crowd
that being black is an adequate consolation/
a consistent grace.
