Poetry

George Elliott Clarke

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Sestina: Castoff

I scoffed at Portugal; I spat; sucked wine.
A mountebank, naughty-back*, of the sea,
Was I: Thus, “patriots” chipped off my face;
Chopped my visage; played Carnage; carved red ink;
Lopped my nose, tongue, ears, and right hand; so blood
Blanked out my looks. Exiled, got I, to rocks—

St. Helena, a volcano the sea
Don’t quite extinguish. I show my slag face
To goats and hogs. A naufrague,∗∗ no-vague ink
Can scribe how shells scraped my scalp to blood,
Then ditto my beard. I look like planed rocks;
Am too tongue-less to taste the sea-salt wine.

I ape now any Moor’s dark, Sphinx-like face—
Blackly expressionless, like blanking ink.
A no-talking poet, I see, through blood,
My pale tears smear the island’s sun-seared rocks
With salt, white salt that even spoils the wine:
Anguish could languish me deep neath the sea.

Portuguese deported my face. No ink
Can illustrate the tidal-wave-thick blood
Their blades cut loose, or how shells, sharp as rocks,
Hacked hairs from skin. Thus, I howl into wine—
Like Rome’s Ovid, banished to the Black Sea,
Where serfs of unsophisticated face

Proved deaf to verse. Regret decays flesh; blood
Pales to tears. I clamber clamorous rocks
And tend my goats, my swine, and swill my wine—
This mouthwash sloshing the brine of the sea—
And try never to show others my face
(Though clever strangers case it in black ink).

I cast a reticle*** in pools, by rocks,
Catch schools frothy broth casts bright as wine,
While dawn and dusk show milk’s lustre. A sea
Surge? No: Tears swamp my heretical face,
Scourged by Portuguese wanting maps to ink
Their theft of Goa, to seal Theft with blood.

I swallow enough wine to swamp a sea.
I have no more face due to damning ink
That, calling for blood, cast me upon rocks.****

Phillis Wheatley Denounces George III

I.

His Royal Majesty’s a sadist—
his tormenting Redcoats
(Red Guard horrors),
tear off a nursing mother’s breast,

her infant still sucking the lopped bit,
tasting salt blood and milk,
before the babe too is dashed down
upon cobblestone or boulders,

to smash open, smouldering.
Lately, at New York, the Redcoats
pitched Patriots’ corpses
into sewers;

yes, stuffed martyrs’ cadavers
into public sewers,
the Cloaca Maxima∗,
but not until the living pulp

had been worried by dogs
or mangled by bayonets.
Other innocents got put to seethe
in barrels that generally boil pig.

II.

War is Apocalypse,
so George III claws our troops,
or sets em afire as his “tapers”
lit by cannons’ bulleting flames:

Our heroes’ tender remains
are even defrauded of graves.
The Anglo Monster crabs the globe—
to pollute it with corpses.

Americans! Liberty lovers!
Don’t let the Britannic parasite
pick us barren!
Better that our pastoral army

meet the terrible “Lion,”
and treat that beast to Goliath-sized
bloodying,
so feeding it with wounds,

it devours itself,
thinking its own body is meat.
Republic, being once a slave,
I know Freedom’s Violence must glare steel.

III.

I foresee a sea
of liquidated plutocrats—
bodies torn apart by sharks—
a smoke-singed Turner.

Pages: 1 2

2 Comments

Diana Manole October 11, 2015 at 5:39 am

Amazing Canticles! Congratulations!

Reply
Jon Bordo April 26, 2016 at 7:53 pm

Thanks for the share — wonderful

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