two more Caribbean poems/reverse racism in the 1980s

Jessie, Maisie and Pat


After cleanup you slowly emerge
for the changeroom like so
many red and pink hibiscus blooming
so many spiky green aloes
and golden sunsets waving
across blue seas of cloth

The subway at University and Dundas
has never burned before
in the middle of a snowstorm



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HURRICANE


Before you had blown out
I was surfing your jigsaw waves
storm-crazed six-footers
ripping sideways into the beach

Hurricane waves you carried me out
beyond my ego, my depth
I remember swimming
desperately for shore
barely making it
panting
on the sands
vomiting
Hurricane, hurricane
hurricane


These are the other two of my poems published in the special lyric issue of Grain magazine in August, 1982 (Vol. X, number 3). They were also included in my Island Women chapbook with HMS Press, 1983, and as part of the same sequence in my 1986  Aya Press collection Foot Through the Ceiling (1986 - recipient of the inaugural Milton Acorn People's Poetry Memorial Award - 1987).

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1980s  reverse racism:

A funny story, reminiscent of the times (early 1980s). I was contacted by CD, an Ottawa poet who was gathering material for an anthology on Caribbean poetry. We had a long phone conversation, and it appeared he was soliciting several poems from Island Women for his project.

Unusual for an editor, CD didn't seem to want to edit my poems, or force the usual ego-driven petty changes I've learned most poetry mag or anthology editors insist upon. But CD was hinting at something I couldn't pinpoint. Was he looking for an overt favour trading of publishing my poems in exchange for a gig at the Main Street Library Poetry Series I was coordinating?  Nope, that didn't seem to be his drift.

Finally CD stopped beating around the bush, and asked me where I was from. I said Canada. More bush beating. Finally CD asked, "Well, what colour are you?" "I guess I'm white," I replied, and that was the end of our conversation. So none of the Island Women poems appeared in this early collection of Caribbean poetry. Good poems, bad timing for politikal correctness and the 'appropriation of voice' madness of the times.