Читать книгу Providential - Colin Channer - Страница 12

CIVIL SERVICE

A man-boy of nearly twenty,

slave-dressing in pantaloons

in 1930, slowly reads a Gleaner

from behind a stocky “German”

woman in a fabric shop.

Finds himself in love.

Walking home, feet adding shine-ness

to a track cut out of scrub,

he hugs the parcel of organdy

that his mother took on trust,

sounds each word the way he did

at first reading, lips moving,

voice too shy to read inside

his head alone.

Above,

birds form an arrow.

Around,

insects hustle-bustle,

get on with the gnawing,

digging, scraping, the noise-making

of their work.

Ahead,

green mountains gallop

left to right, unbroken herd.

Civil service, says

our young romantic

over and over again.

Maybe where you go

to be a civilize

and not no cunumunu,

as Miss Lady styled him

when she dressed him down

for reading out her paper,

eye-raping her neck-back.

But it’s an error that I live off,

this man-boy’s misread,

a blunder he compounded

as he clambered into

walks of guavas, figs

and pomegranates,

fruits with no owner,

taking steeper slopes

toward the ridge his kin

had come to after

getting their free paper,

dug their yam hills,

planted roots.

A better reader

would have gotten

hired by the Royal Mail.

But which colonial system

could afford to waste a fellow

like granddad:

obedient, simple-minded,

burly, color struck.

They couldn’t trust him

with an envelope. They

issued him a gun.