“In Childhood, Certain Skies Refined My Seeing”

Sunset. That blood-orange hymn
combusting the year, nautilus chamber

of youth’s obscurities, your empty room
for psalms, lost rituals. There find the bittersweetness

of one’s unknown body, heliotropic:
Welcome, stranger of myself.

Consider the Jumbie bird clanging its deathshriek
like a gong, shooting through our mapless season,

unnaming the home you’re always leaving,
scattering the names we have lost again.

The heart and its bombshell
bespeak the hurricane—what

has drowned, has drowned.
She will not return. The headless sky

unseals and aches for us, mother and sister
caught upon the steel hook of its memory.

Wet mouth of my future body, we’ve come to understand
each word, and how sometimes the words

themselves will do. Obeah-man, augured island,
I am called to remember the burning palm

and the broad refuge of the Poinciana tree.
Dear Family, how willingly I pushed my feet

into the hot coals of your lamentation.
Jamaica, if I wear your lunacy like a dark skin,

or lock this day away in the voodoo-garden
of our parting, know that I still mimic your wails,

knee-deep in beach, know I am gouging the stars
for any trace of ghost. For the algorithm

of uncertain history. The simple language
of our cannibal sea. If Grandfather,

your wandering fishermen still recast
their lives down on the disappearing shore,

know I too am scorching there.
Igniting and devouring
each abducted day.