Written piece
For birds, for water, for stone
Maggie Harris
United Kingdom
About this piece
This is a poem honouring Caribbean history. As a Guyanese woman writer living in the UK, I honour the artists and creatives who have woven narratives and music through a painful history to reclaiming their voices. Amongst these I praise my own mother, who told me stories.
For birds, for water, for stone
When the music took me I was ready
It bored into my bones like a megaphone
Bob Marley would know this all-consuming pain
Bruised by beauty of our islands, broken again and again
By the brutal acceptance of stabbings, our histories
Spreading over our body like a million bees.
When my mother told me stories I was ready
She drew the threads from Madeira and Africa
And wove them like linen as I sat on her knee.
Walcott would know, Brathwaite would know. Salif Keita
Would know I understood every word he sang even though
I did not speak his language.
But he told me, he told me, this is your story too.
His skin was the colour of bone, his voice
A nightingale’s penetrated by stones. The heat
Of the desert sun, the cymbals of our mothers’ and fathers’
Chains shackled from heartland to coast
Their languages settling in the back of the throat
Refusing to be swallowed, ululating in darkness
From century to century, drawing down the names
For birds, for water, for stone, for mother, for lions
For goats, for Kente, for synonyms to chant in percussion
Through reeds and cowries, gourds and seeds, from shak-shak
From rains, from thunder from fire, from a thousand Zulus
Stamping their pain on this stolen earth so one day
One day Congatay, all their languages would converge
Unravel from unpronounceable words pressed to the tongue
Through centuries of conquest, break like rapids, rise
Like a rage of macaws to enter the ears and the pores
Of the children scattered all over the world
And sing, listen, this is your story, this is your story, this.