School Story:
I am writing a series of poems about growing up in Montego Bay. Here are a few.
THE QUIZ
The quiz is in progress, tension in the air
Thammo looks at ShyKey and trembles with fear.
ShyKey surveys his team with a confident eye.
One to tie, two to win, we’ll do or die.
The quiz master clears his throat and begins to speak;
The audience keeps silent for fear of Mr. Crick
“Who capture Jamaica in 1655?”
Thammo looks puzzled, but ShyKey gets alive.
Illustrious ShyKey speaks with a smile on his face
Head high, chest out, he speaks with condescending grace:
“I think it was Benbow who did that very thing”
The boys laugh, the girls twitter, Thammo puts on a grin.
“Oh no, I was mistaken”, ShyKey speaks once again.
“ I am sure it was Penables and Admiral Venn.”
Thammo laughs so loudly he falls to the floor.
ShyKey tucks in his tail and heads for the door.
MANGO TREE
Pow Pow chose to flee,
but he waited,
until he had safely negotiated
the barbed wire fence surrounding
the headmaster’s yard, before announcing
the presence of the handyman,
two dogs of nondescript origin,
and the headmaster, called Django
because his quickness and proficiency,
though with a cane and not a pistol,
rivaled that of the western gunslinger.
Screech Owl clambered down from the Julie mango tree
but before he could put up much of a fight
he was quickly surrounded and interrogated.
Even when Screechie, in a voice not yet deepened by puberty,
claimed to be from Chetwood, the elementary school
across from the Mount Alvernia tennis courts,
and Django with a straight face insisted
that his mangoes were for the Cornwall boys,
I remained frozen with fear in the canopy
of the East Indian mango tree, where on a dare
and the promise of sweet ambrosia, I found myself.
The shaking of my legs must have resonated
with the sound of the wind laughing through the leaves.
To this day, I am grateful that they never looked up.
SECOND CITY
I.
"You are not from here," she says,
the sparkle in her childhood eyes unshaded
By clouds of offense.
"Are you from Southern Illinois?"
"Yes," I answered, "Way, way south;
From a little town called Montego Bay."
II.
Duppy Park
is named for those whose ghosts refused to leave
in the cacophony of ambulances and helicopters
transporting the sick and feeble to the peace and shelter
of the new hospital up at Mount Salem.
With each setting sun they arise
to foot the sand in search of sea cockroaches,
and comb the surf for Irish moss, an edible seaweed
said to be an aphrodisiac when eaten with papaya.
They shed their age and infirmities
To flirt amidst the flowers planted
over the foundations of the old hospital buildings.
III.
At 2:30 pm on Wednesdays and Fridays,
and 3:10 on other weekdays,
the boys from Cornwall College
in khaki uniforms and striped epaulettes
(red for honor, gold for fame)
and the girls from Mount Alvernia,
their pleated white uniforms accented with navy blue ties,
hurry down the hill on their way to the bus stop at Coral Wall.
Unless there is a navy ship in the harbor.
Then they stop to gawk
at the snaking lines of sailors
waiting their turn to get into Royal Palm.
IV.
All roads radiate from Sam Sharpe Square
named for the leader of a slave rebellion,
a Baptist deacon who was hung
where the fountain now stands.
Mama told me never to lay with a woman
unless I was willing to take her there and hold her hand,
even in the midst of a street dance or a civic ceremony.
V.
The dreadlocked Rasta man sits knitting
woolen hats of “aits” (vegan red), green and gold.
in his booth at one corner of the Craft Market.
The inky smoke
of his pungent herb
charges the air
with the staccato beat
of reggae.
VI.
Downstream from the gardens at Irwin,
the Montego River undulates,
snakes and hesitates,
creating pools and riffles
filled with crayfish, mullet, and tiki tiki.
When it gets to Westgate Plaza,
it rushes, straight as an arrow,
down to the sea.
Surely the river gods have a sense of humor,
for I caught the biggest fish ever seen in the river,
a goggly-eyed, dirt-brown mudfish whose thrashing
elicited exclamation words not fit for mixed company,
just minutes after I vowed on the life of my mother
to throw the next one I caught back into the water.
VII.
One of the veterans playing draughts in Parish Church Park
claims he saw the mermaid that lives beneath the old light house
near Fowler Bridge. "That is impossible," drawls his opponent.
"She left with the coming of the pumps and the dredges.
Now it is too far for her to travel to the sea."
VIII.
When the mayor, with full pomp and circumstance,
gave the keys of the city to his counterpart from Atlanta,
did he remember when he was but a school bway,
and the then city fathers in their infinite wisdom
made Boys’ School and Girls’ School co-educational?
The stone throwing only stopped during mango season.
Neither the long concrete wall, nor renaming
the schools Coronaldi Avenue and Barracks Road
Primary, respectively, could force two young ram goats
to live peaceably in the same enclosure.
On the last day of each school term,
the canteens doled out surplus flour,
cornmeal, bulgur rice, and milk powder.
Neatly wrapped in one-pound brown paper bags,
these then became our weapons of choice.
IX.
He says he is a native of “Montego,”
the word rolling off his tongue
with a familiarity designed to impress
the tourist girl in the leather-laced denim skirt
who gobbles up his words as if they were manna.
No way!
No one who grew up within its borders,
would shorten its name to anything other
than “Mo-Bay.”
FULL MOON OVER MONTEGO BAY
I.
Genie stands watch over the old Catholic cemetery
just a stone's throw from Cornwall College.
He, and the armies that battle in his head, are undisturbed,
except for holidays and special anniversaries,
when relatives materialize, as if out of thin air,
to put flowers on the graves of long dead ancestors.
On one such occasion, he offered to share the meal
cooking in a blackened cheesepan over a twig fire.
I might have sampled the cornmeal dumplings,
but I did not know if the stones Genie used
to keep the fish from jumping out of the pot
were clean.
II.
Chico’s canvases are the walls
of an abandoned building on Union Street.
His purples and mustards are edged with black.
Some say they are from his nightmares,
others insist they are expertly replicated
from the petals of a Dutchman’s Pipe.
Every woman that passes by is an object of his affection.
I learnt a useful lesson when a girl from Mount Alvernia
with a short afro and smooth ebony skin
crossed the road and threaded her arm through his
to escape Chico’s unwelcome attention:
You don’t have to be fancy,
just better looking than the competition.
III.
Some time in the distant past, Lami stole a duck.
Though the judge fined him and set him free,
his true sentence was a lifetime of hard labor.
For every school boy knows that if he but quacks
Lami will lose his vacant slack-jawed stare,
work himself into a frenzy, and spew invectives into the air.
The boy had better run faster than Donald Quarrie.
IV.
Bun Up is never without an oversized bible wrapped in a plastic bag.
He is a meticulous dresser; always black pants
and a clean, even if threadbare, white shirt.
His salt and pepper beard is never untrimmed,
and he has a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.
You would expect him to be a flirtatious man.
But woe to the unsuspecting lady that catches his attention!
He opens his bible and gives a complete recitation
of an inimitable, updated version of Dante’s Inferno.
He concludes every performance by stressing
“You will bun up!”
