10-15-2024
George Eliott Clarke
THE MINISTRY OF X.
Judas’s account of our accounts
dusts off neat heaps of gold.
Our minimal needs—
bread, milk, fish, honey, wine—
meet snappy Satisfaction.
But wherever we preach next,
corralling the flocks,
prices skyrocket.
Too bad:
The Bible ain't perfume, ain't flavours,
to be sampled.
I offer up cutting-edge prayer,
consistently searing:
Avoid all misspelt Scripture.
I refuse any half-tasted wine.
I'll leave no half-built state.
(Pass on a Jerusalem of blues.)
Marina (Maria)
is a barbarous sweet.
Her cotton, wispy, yields sly Delight.
(Ain’t she singing Wisdom,
perched, Puritan, on a pristine, white horse?)
I've restored her good girl's uncut "V."
(Discretion is finesse, gusto!)
The false white star—
the moon—
pours white wax in our eyes.
[Roissy-en-France (France) 3 février mmxiii]
THE BOOK OF ESTHER (VII).
1. Having 3 days and 3 nights prayed—
in dour, bedraggling outfit—
Esther now, gilt like a queen,
tic-toc’d in heels to the dread séance.
2. The moon was tubby, colossal—
overgrown—amid copper shards of stars.
It be a full-orbed moon; a moon of Bright Nights;
an April/Nisan moon!
3. Radiant, majestic, beautiful, Esther exited,
and arrived, every atom of her a king’s consort.
4. Fear thunder-blasted Esther’s heart;
it lightning’d her innermost veins.
5. After seven doors unlocked for her,
came she The Queen to King Tax,
flounced on a throne of gold and jewels.
6. He was almost inconspicuously vigorous;
exuded visceral Glamour:
Clearly, he could gallop to trumpets and bray at War.
Brio—armipotent*—defined his bio.
7. Excruciating, splendid Oppression,
the royal glance struck at Esther.
She paled, quailed, faltered—
fell—leaned on an equally quivering maid.
8. Esther felt as weak as a wax museum statue
in the midst of a 5-alarm blaze.
9. Seeing his queen faint, King Tax
rushed to palm her chin and stroke her hair.
10. “Beloved wife, only subjects without appointment,
who creep, peeping at my feet,
need be stabbed into the floor.”
11. Now, King Tax brushed his gold scepter,
worshipfully across Queen Esther’s throat,
raising a hairline blush, and said,
“Powwow openly.”
12. Esther explained, “Thou resemblest so much
an angel of the Hebrew God,
I had to tremble:
Thou art dreadful—and so marvellous.”
13. Suddenly, Esther passed out; slampered up
(collapsed);
her marrow-bones—knees—
once copper, seemed sand.
14. Agitated, King Tax Atlas’d his bride,
and schlepped her to his—their—sleeping quarters.
Doted now his heart on Esther—
just as a lion is pacified
by wine—
OR by a spider’s bite or a snake’s fangs.
[Halifax (Nova Scotia) 21 & 22 décembre mmxvi]
* Powerful in arms.
-from Canticles II: (MMXIX), selected by Fall 2024 PoemoftheWeek.com Guest Editor Hollay Ghadery.
Poet, novelist, playwright, and critic George Elliott Clarke was born near Windsor, Nova Scotia and grew up in Halifax. He earned his BA from the University of Waterloo, MA from Dalhousie University, and PhD from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry including Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues (1983), Lush Dreams, Blue Exile: Fugitive Poems 1978-2993 (1994), Execution Poems: The Black Acadian Tragedy of George and Rue (2001), which won the Governor General’s Literary Award, Illuminated Verses (2005), Black (2006), and the dramatic poem Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path (2007).
Clarke’s work reflects his interests in the Black culture of Atlantic Canada, an experience and identity he has described as “Africadian.” He has explored the cultural and social histories of Black Canadians across various genres, frequently braiding together archival research and personal experience. He is the author of the verse-novel Whylah Falls (1990), which he later adapted for the radio and stage, and librettos for the operas Beatrice Chancy (1999) and Québécité (2003). Clarke is also the author of the novel George and Rue (2005) and many critical and scholarly works, including Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002).
Clarke is a seventh-generation Canadian of African American and Mi'kmaq Amerindian descent. His mother’s ancestors arrived in Canada as American slaves liberated by the British in the War of 1812. He has described Three Mile Plains, the town where his grandparents lived, as a “black Eden” that first inspired him to become a poet: “I'd begun to craft poetry—unmusicked ‘songs’—when I was 15, and Three Mile Plains was their locus,” Clarke wrote in an article for Canadian Geographic. “The day I became incontrovertibly, irremedially a poet was February 12, 1977, my 17th birthday, when my mother and I drove to Three Mile Plains on a sunny, frigid, snowy morning. That day, as I trudged up and down hilly, white-dusted Green Street, I drafted in my head a poem, my first attempt to sing a black and Nova Scotian—an Africadian—consciousness. With my breath hanging clear in front of me, I claimed my Afro-Mi'kmaq heritage. I was standing on land that has always made us feel whole.”
Clarke is the recipient of numerous honors and awards for his work, including numerous honorary doctorates, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Achievement Award, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellowship Prize, the Planet Africa Renaissance Award, and appointment to the Order of Nova Scotia. He is professor of English at the University of Toronto.
