Poem
Dorothea Smartt
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
Here I lie. A hollowSamboo. Filled with your tears
and regrets. The tick in the eye
of Lancaster pride. The stutter,
the pause, the dry cough, shifting
eyes that cannot meet a Black man’s
gaze. Questions, questions from either
side that foul us for answers. The how
and the why ultimately defeating us
with shame, with anger, with the defensive
voices of those who lived and enjoyed
the benefits, who did not question too
deeply the source that enriched
all of Lancaster life.
Who will heal and elevate to light
the souls of your ancestors if
you refuse to remember? If you
cover their incarnations with half-truths?
Grocer? You were a Slave Trader!
And everything has its price,
and denial is only debt
with interest to be paid.
© 2013, Dorothea Smartt
From: Ship Shape
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press, Leeds
From: Ship Shape
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press, Leeds
Dorothea Smartt
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1963)
Dorothea Smartt has been a prominent voice for black women poets since the 1980s, called by her mentor Kamau Braithwaite the ‘Brit-born Bajan International’. If this sounds like a movement, call it a movement towards voice, as Smartt claims for her work what she refers to as her ‘two voices’: her ‘London voice’ of standard English, and her ‘Bajan voice’ – the voice of her childhood and her dre...
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Poems of Dorothea Smartt
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BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
Here I lie. A hollowSamboo. Filled with your tears
and regrets. The tick in the eye
of Lancaster pride. The stutter,
the pause, the dry cough, shifting
eyes that cannot meet a Black man’s
gaze. Questions, questions from either
side that foul us for answers. The how
and the why ultimately defeating us
with shame, with anger, with the defensive
voices of those who lived and enjoyed
the benefits, who did not question too
deeply the source that enriched
all of Lancaster life.
Who will heal and elevate to light
the souls of your ancestors if
you refuse to remember? If you
cover their incarnations with half-truths?
Grocer? You were a Slave Trader!
And everything has its price,
and denial is only debt
with interest to be paid.
From: Ship Shape
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME
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