01-20-2024
Raymond Antrobus
THE ACCEPTANCE
Dad’s house stands again, four years
after being demolished. I walk in.
He lies in bed, licks his rolling paper,
and when I ask Where have you been?
We buried you. He says I know,
I know. I lean into his smoke, tell him
I went back to Jamaica, I met your brothers,
losing you made me need them. He says
something I don’t hear. What? Moving lips,
no sound. I shake my head. He frowns.
Disappears. I wake in the hotel room,
heart drumming. I get up slowly, the floor
is wet. I wade into the bathroom,
my father stands by the sink, all the taps
running. He laughs and takes
my hand, squeezes, his ring
digs into my flesh. I open my eyes again.
I’m by a river, a shimmering sheet
of green marble. Red ants crawl up
an oak tree’s flaking bark. My hands
are cold mud. I follow the tall grass
by the riverbank, the song, my deaf Orisha
of music, Oshun, in brass bracelets and earrings,
bathes my father in a white dress. I wave, Hey!
She keeps singing. The dress turns the river
gold and there’s my father surfacing.
He holds a white and green drum. I watch him
climb out the water, drip towards Oshun.
They embrace. My father beats his drum.
With shining hands, she signs: Welcome.
FOR TYRONE GIVENS
The paper said putting him in jail
without his hearing aids was like
putting him in a hole in the ground.
There are no hymns
for deaf boys. But who can tell
we’re deaf without speaking to us?
Tyrone’s name was misspelled
in the HMP Pentonville prison system.
Once, I was handcuffed,
shoved into a police van. I didn’t hear
the officer say why, I was saved
by my friend’s mother who threw herself
in the road and refused to let the van drive away.
Who could have saved Tyrone?
James Baldwin attempted suicide
after each of his loves
jumped from bridges or overdosed.
He killed his characters, made them
kill themselves –– Rufus, Richard,
Black men who couldn’t live like this.
Tyrone, I won writing awards
bought new hearing aids and heard
my name through the walls.
I bought a signed Baldwin book.
The man who sold it to me didn’t know
you, me or Baldwin.
I feel I rescued it. I feel failed.
Tyrone, the last time I saw you alive
I’d dropped my pen
on the staircase
didn’t hear it fall but you saw and ran
down to get it, handed it to me
before disappearing, said,
you might need this.
A SHORT SPEECH WRITTEN ON RECEIPTS
Are we about to enter history or
Café Tout de Suite on Verret Street?
The waitress has a face as much African
as Vietnamese, as if even the grease
on her white shirt came from
a long line of proud Creole cooks.
I have always felt guilty needing any
small service. My mother is a market
trader. As a child I once kicked
a woman who kept talking without buying.
I’m thinking my mother could do everything
right and still not survive. I’ve not grown out
of carrying anxious bags into every room
where I become a customer. It’s a thing
if I’m passing a market and the street hagglers
want me to name a price. It’s hard to say
what that should be when I see my mother
in tired light saying this was a good day, this
was a bad day. This waitress has a bandana
tied tight around her head, apron around
her waist—all her kitchen sweats look
listened to. Sometimes I feel guilty asking
someone to repeat, but she repeats and
nobody dies. Maybe kindness is how
you take down the stalls. This waitress
and my mother would show up at my funeral,
a short speech written on receipts.
They’d stand next to my coffin, say
we made this hungry man’s dish,
slow cooked his fish and he ate, messy
and grateful as he lived.
-from All the Names Given (Tin House Books, 2021), selected by Spring 2024 PoemoftheWeek.com Guest Editor, Sheila Black
Raymond Antrobus MBE FRSL was born in London, Hackney to an English mother and Jamaican father. He is the author of Shapes & Disfigurements (Burning Eye, 2012) To Sweeten Bitter (Out-Spoken Press, 2017), The Perseverance (Penned In The Margins / Tin House, 2018), All The Names Given (Picador / Tin House, 2021), Signs, Music (Picador / Tin House, 2024). His individual poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Granta, Poetry Foundation, Lit Hub, London Review of Books, The Poetry Review, The Deaf Poets Society and elsewhere. In 2019 he became the first ever poet to be awarded the Rathbone Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. Other accolades include The Ted Hughes Award, Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, PBS Winter Choice, A Sunday Times Young Writer of the year Award, Somerset Maugham Award and The Guardian Poetry Book Of The Year 2018, as well as a shortlist for The Griffin Prize, T.S. Eliot Prize and Forward Prize. In 2018 he was awarded The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, (Judged by Ocean Vuong), for his poem Sound Machine. Also in 2019 and 2021 his poems (Jamaican British, The Perseverance and Happy Birthday Moon) was added to the UK’s GCSE syllabus. READ MORE HERE...
