Nana, what about love?
Love?… Love?… Love is not safe.
Ama Ata Aidoo, ‘Changes’
But barter we did: it remains still
to be clear what we won; what else
it was we lost:
whitefrocked girls on silly sundays
in their yellow shoes;
small bottles and april showers;
the regent slant and tilt of a straw hat;
long-stockinged scriptures; the litter
of harbours where certain ladies once sat
on the railings of deserted quays and ate
out of the empty thighs of strange men
(wherever it was that cunt met dick
in the simple enough english
that jigs so at the heart of the matter).
like to like, and organizing chaos,
how could we sink?
the gods stand up for bastards:
in their own odd dance
they fall out of the sky,
with their foreskins peeled back.
we could kneel, too, on the sea,
ambitious as salt water
itself, and not sink; though the caked
hulls of ships, their ships,
when they depart, shake
the wakes we intend, or keep.
gravel, shale; compost heap or rock
face – and the earth thinks to reject
knowledge of our weight,
now that we know to pass yellow water
through the holes we are left to own;
we who had thought to hoard thought
in graceless aims,
diving for the difference
in some broken language of love!
call us Ishmael (if you please) or Barabbas;
Habibatu and Zenobia. Cain, too.
we take a count in figure and in sum,
no matter how hissed as injury into the ear;
we barter coinage for coin, and do not sink.