Mammon

Lyrics

Brathwaite's reading of this poem can be heard on SoundCloud or by opening this annotation Mammon1So in this tilted alleyway that rolls in debris to the sea I kick my way among the wealth of fish smells, fish bones, to my father's home. Around me, children's feet still walk to school with swinging bag and nothing more. No face, no features scrawled upon the whirling disc the needle gnawing into grooves of flesh and time. Hot airless evenings and the night of dogs the howling morning sun, prowling among the rocks and fowls. The world for us was billy- goat smell drying on the wall; was desks and benches regularly scrubbed and scraped; was rags wrapped tight to make a cricket ball; the pain of waiting for the whip rope tamarind lash, hurled by the thick necked sweating God who ruled our little school. We called these things an Elementary School: Head Heart and Hand the motto, and the three R's taught: Reading, a little Riting, and some Rural lust: the immemorial legacies of dust. 2And with his nerves scraped white like Spanish Nettle noise worries him the growing islands he would work for, worry him. Fisher- men have loud rash voices; on the sanded floor feet scrape illiterate in the liquor shop. Behind the door he closed in vain---noise worried him---the children scamper round a happy ball: ex- citements crawling over carpets, armchairs and the other dozen vexed and glued-together sticks of hire-purchased furn- iture that trip and trick them, term- inate their game. Noise worried him. E- rect, straight backed, their dun- lopillow bottoms bound in strict imported gir- dles, the limbo loving girls he loved, stepped on the pavements in stil- etto heels, tipp- ing staccato over orange peel. Sucked dry as that same orange peel by his new dusty city, his knuckles clutching tight in padded purring cars, he watches, glowing slow- ly mad, the awe- tomatic traffic lights: red hot, the too slow green gored by electric horns. This was the land- scape where his fears were born; here the sick stalk, torn of its tugging hope, could not escape the blazing season's fe- ver; trees, covered walks, dark mango alley- ways, the love of jerk- pork, snow-ball, souse, small wooden houses with their step- up stones, were ruined in the glare. Now slave no more now harbour- less no more, he forges from his progress' flames, new iron masters; brilliant concrete crosses--- look---he bears---to crucify his freedom. So he must cut the cane- fields of Caymanas down, of Chaguaramas down: the soil too soiled with whip, with toil, with memory, with dust; re- placing them with soil- less, stain- less, name- less stalks of steel like New York, Paris, London town.