PAMELA MORDECAI ~

 

Yellow Girl Blues

                                     for Jane King

My mama she done told me

she tell me every day

no mind your skin is yellow

you're a nigger anyway.

Yellow girl blues

yellow girl blues

I walking on the muddy road

in my sampata shoes.

So I grew up a nigger

please check on my behind,

my mouth, my nose, my curly

hair— I'm glad to know my kind.

Yellow girl blues

yellow girl blues.

I walking on the muddy road

in my sampata shoes.

And I go to America

and join in all the fights

sit in and demonstrate

and go to jail for Civil Rights.

Yellow girl blues

yellow girl blues.

I walk through so much macca

there's holes in all my shoes.

Dr King say it don't matter

he say we all is one —

the hose don't know the difference

nor the truncheon, nor the gun.

Yellow girl blues

yellow girl blues.

I feel the firewater

as it soak in through my shoes.

Now I come north to Canada

my story it is true

they look me in my face and say

"White woman, who is you?"

Yellow girl blues

yellow girl blues.

I walking in the macca still

and my own take away my shoes.

______________

A Fierce Green Place

New and Selected Poems

New Directions, 2022

EDOUARD GLISSANT ~

November


   And the oar is rooted in its waiting for a new land. Love for you,
Oceania, is a rag tied to a mast, a coconut palm of fog at your side,
Oceania in your shadow which is like a cathedral commemorating
the uncivilized and I tame the waves of your robes Asia and Europe in our childhoods Asia a coral polyp living and feeding on itself, between sky and battle, which Europe is a field of nails. No longer hearing the rusted stream of wild butterflies on a thick day. Ever more fierce, the elections of assassins in the beautiful cancerous rain. O the loveliest rain in which to pile up our skins, the loveliest O fingers of lianas in the brush of the ringing desert Africa. The final mission was to mislead the word through the rich deafness of scorched Tropics. Like a summation of memory—intoxicated fruits in the mute desire of the banana trees.


____________ 
Edouard Glissant
The Collected Poetry
University of Minnesota Press
2005