as if he had been there, but it was only a story passing on.

Pai should have sat at her feet as a free Yoruba boy.

Instead he was a no-man who never sailed home.

WHEN AFRICANS came from the coast, I dreamt the ocean.

It was vast, empty, man could see through time.

I saw Pai evaporate in the feverish swamp of malaria,

his waterlogged flesh steamed, lips drooled yellow sap.

One humid night Pai crossed over into the blue of dawn,

I planted the seed of a baobab tree over his buried body,

watched it grasp at life over years that gave me manhood,

resolved to one day plant a tree from Pai’s bone-fed seed

in Yorubaland, his home across the ocean – and ours.

When we were grown into men, Senhor Fernandés died,

Before death his sunken eyes were desperate.

His favourite act had been to order a public flogging,

put melted wax on his victim’s lacerated back

and make us watch as he slowly peeled it off.

In his will he bequeathed we brothers our freedom.

We celebrated by ripping down his youthful portrait

from above the fireplace in the banqueting hall,

taking it to the river, smudging shit over it then watching

it burn as the fire threw an eerie light onto our faces.

From the loathing distorting Gilberto’s features,

I knew then that Rage would consume him.

Salvador, Bahia, 1862 –

BABA

WE WERE EMANCIPADOS, with papers to prove it.

Like war-torn soldiers we trekked from moon to moon

through the wilderness of Bahia to the city of Salvador,

where, perched like gulls on a windswept cliff,

the ocean gave me breath when I first saw and loved it.

We slept on the beach between cactus and bush, watched

Bahianas balance baskets of fish on wrapped heads,

brightly-layered skirts flounced by revolving hips,

long thin pipes gripped by teeth in hardened mouths.

We were seduced into the bosom of Salvador’s bustling

streets: Terreiro de Jesus, Cidade Alta, Largo do Pelhourino.

Ah, Salvador took us all – Africanos livres and escravos,

the brancos who battered the cobbles in jangling carriages,

the sararas, morenos, mulattos, who did not see us

as we scavenged for food or begged for work at the docks.

In time we hulked great containers of sewage about the city,

slept on mats in a passage in the back streets of Pelhourinho,

gulped the sweet fire of cachaça in bars past darkness,

where Gilberto fired his pain in blood and body battles

and I’d slip to the shore with a free serving girl, Joana,

its plump beach spread to take the plunging, frothing waves.

Then the current suddenly dragged me fathoms under.

Gilberto was knifed to death by sailors at the docks.

We had survived twenty-two summers as one.

I TOOK OFF for the jungle where I could lose myself.

My beloved Gilberto had fitted me like a second skin.

Now I felt skinless, my nerves raw, exposed, weeping.