When Napoleon sailed the Great Mother Ship
called France, I fell prey to national amnesia

I beg of you, make of me a memory once more
Let me be known

They froze, glasses raised.
The waiter passed through them,

clearing the cutlery away, clanking
down a saucer with the bill.

L’addition, he sniffed, standing there
like a policeman while I sleepily

re-emerged into the twentieth century
and rummaged for my credit card.

make of me a memory once more

my people came out of nowhere, Joseph, were transplanted

on to on an island, and memory began with Clasford’s folks,

Ida and Wilbur, straight-backed, Presbyterian cane-cutters,

living out an obscure death in a dour studio portrait

and Evangeline Avery, Pearline’s mother, crippled

by cutlass-wielding husband George,

who ended up face down in the creek for five days,

because he wasn’t worth fishing out

my people come from a straggly, disgruntled queue

of slaves, masters and indentured servants,

of whom I was never allowed to speak –

the hoe, the road, the rape, the tongue split by a knife,

then slowly ripped apart like the tough, succulent

flesh of the yucca

shame, shame, shame Doan go raking up the past, Stanley

Pearline, born within two decades of the nineteenth century:

she could reach out of her basket,

touch its cusp with the twentieth, stroke the weals marking

her great-grandmother’s elephant-hide back

long before she and Clasford moved to London, and taught me

to honour my parents but not those who went before,

stuffed anonymously into an airless attic trunk

with moth-eaten clothes and discarded mementoes

shame, shame, shame

Clasford always said that Jamaica delivered him and England

destroyed him, but he was wrong, Joseph, you see

both formed him – one with the sun, the other with rain

as you were the bastard son of the islands and La France

and you dared to make that difference your own,

so I will discover my difference and make it my own

The Camargue

Take a risk, come with me –

To where the chests of valleys have collapsed with their final prehistoric breath

Miles of wispy conifer plantations, spines bending with the wind in a parade of arbour-aerobics

Freshly burnt clumps of bulrushes heaped alongside the sinewy tongues of canals

Soft-flowing meadows where hay has yet to be scythed down into spiked and angry stubble

Flamingos gather on mud flats, rubbery necks flopped over as their bills search for food in the shallows

Corps de ballet

Scarlet skies

The Camargue at dawn

Savannahs of rice paddies, as if Vietnam; salt-pans and pyramids, as if Egypt

Bulls’ heads nailed to the doors of the herdsmen’s thatched cabanes – a tribal motif

Choreography of wild white horses charging across marsh and pasture

Listen –

To the hypnotic chug of the car’s engine, like a damaged third lung

To the pursed whistle of oxygen coming in fast through the open windows