Читать книгу Providential - Colin Channer - Страница 10

CLAN

(for Kwame Dawes)

Every clan has its colors, its history, its foes,

its limits, its ways of notching who’s out and in.

Every clan has its parlance, its secrets, its publics,

its fables, its side deals cut with death.

These old street gangs of Kingston,

city ghillies, croton orange, chocho green,

are not manics, but shrewd evaluators

of their worth: shooters part-making an epic,

a story kept in breath, refreshed

at corner fetes of chicken, smoky bread,

at fish spots on the dark foreshore,

waves translating patwa to a lost Aegean tongue.

Hail, Spanglers, Shower,

Byah, Copper, Starkey, Bucky.

Hail, Claudie, Zacky, Rhygin,

Feather Mop.

Every clan has its children, its widows,

its fathers, its prayers, its vengeance pledge,

its poems, its dances, its pictures,

its questions never set.

Who gave the order? When will it end?

Every clan has peaks it never gets to,

humps to get over, mounds of buried hurt.

We belongers sieve the fragments

from the midden, make molds.

Shells. Shit. Skin. Seeds. Bone.