Jah / Ananse

Lyrics

Brathwaite's reading of these poems can be heard on SoundCloud, via the audio player (above right), or by opening this annotation Jah1Nairobi's male elephants uncurl their trumpets to heaven Toot-Toot takes it up in Havana in Harlem bridges of sound curve through the pale rigging of saxophone stops the ship sails, slips on banana peel water, eating the dark men. Has the quick drummer nerves after the stink Sabbath's unleavened cries in the hot hull? From the top of the music, slack Bwana Columbus rides out of the jungle's den. With my blue note, my cracked note, full flatten- ed fifth, my ten bebop fingers, my black bottom'd strut, Panama worksong, my cabin, my hut, my new frigged-up soul and God's heaven, heaven, gonna walk all over God's heaven ... I furl away from the trumpet my bridge stops in the New York air elevator speeds me to angels heaven sways in the reinforced girders; God is glass with his type- writer teeth, gospel jumps and pings off the white paper, higher and higher; the eagle's crook neck, the vulture's talons clutching tight as a blind baby's fist, still knows the beat of the root blood up through the rocks, up through the torn hummingbird trees, guitar strings, eyrie; the buffaloes' boom through the dust plains, the antelope's sniff at the water, eland's sudden hurl through the hurdle of fire, runnels upwards to them through the hoof of the world. But here God looks out over the river yellow mix of the neon lights high up over the crouching cotton-wool green and we float, high up over the sighs of the city, like fish in a gold water world we float round and round in the bright bubbled bowl without hope of the hook, of the fisherman's tugging-in root; eyes without bait, snout without words, teeth with nothing to kill, skill of fin for a child's wonder, pale scales for collectors to sell; and God, big eyes bulging his glass house aglobe floating floating in heaven without feet without wind without wing without thunder no stone under him no sound to carry earth up to his fathoms no ground to keep him down near the gods 2For the land has lost the memory of the most secret places. We see the moon but cannot remember its meaning. A dark skin is a chain but it cannot recall the name of its tribe. There are no chiefs in the village. The gods have been forgotten or hidden. A prayer poured on the ground with water, with rum, will not bid them come back. Creation has burned to a spider. It peeps over the hills with the sunrise but prefers to spin webs in the trees. The sea is a divider. It is not a life-giver, Time's river. The islands are the humped backs of mountains, green turtles that cannot find their way. Volcanoes are voiceless. They have shut their red eyes to the weather. The sun that was once a doom of gold to the Arawaks is now a flat boom in the sky. AnanseWith a black snake's un- winking eye thinking thinking through glass through quartz quarries of stony water with a doll's liquid gaze, crystal, his brain green, a green chrysalis storing leaves, memories trunked up in a dark attic, he stumps up the stares of our windows, he stares, stares he squats on the tips of our language black burr of conundrums eye corner of ghosts, ancient his- tories; he spins drum- beats, silver skin webs of sound through the villages; Tacky heard him and L'Ouverture all the hung- ry dumb-bellied chieftains who spat their death into the ground: Goave, Port-au-Prince, Half Moon Fort, villages, dead lobster-pot crews, wire, red sea shells, coconut trees' hulls, nodding skulls, black iron bells, clogged, no glamour of noon on the man- grove shore. Now the poor hang him up in the ceiling, their brooms cannot reach his hushed corner and he sits with the dust, desert's rainfall of soot, plotting a new fall from heaven threading threading the moon moonlight stories his full mouth agape a black pot grinning grinning round fire that boils in his belly walloboa wood words, eyes, fireflies, sparks, crashing coals' waterfalls, grey ashes aroused, old men's ghosts, cinders, burnt memories' eyes in the hot hut, flesh, curling silver, revealing their shadows of meaning as the god stares down, black beating heart of him breathing breathing consuming our wood and the words of our houses black iron-eye'd eater, the many-eye'd maker, creator, dry stony world-maker, word-breaker, creator ... In the yard the dog barks at the stranger.