Proof

I came here when I was six –

I was dark-skinned in a thin dress and I loved my grandmother –
she was my mother – and she raised me with my three sisters who still stand waving me goodbye –

I was the first to come to England, and when I arrived, I knew –

I knew – something had happened to me – I knew that what I saw in the mirror had been darkened, differently arranged –

when I looked at myself in my new coat and boots I saw – I saw – something like a net that catches death –

I was the child of two strangers with my last name – who bathed me – scrubbed me with the seawater at the bottom of their lives –

two ghosts rubbing soap on my shoulders –

two dead people in their house clothes telling me to wash my neck –

I feel – I feel like I have to hold on – and say – and say –

I don’t want to die in this country – let me die with my grandmother –
I want to be rotted by the sun –

and I want her shadow to fall along my body –

and I want to be shaded by her grief –

and I want the dogs to hanker for my bones –

I want to be eaten by worms and become an ackee tree –

lord, I said – I said it in such a whisper

I could have put the ground to sleep –

don’t let me die in England I said to the pavement –

to the sea-black rain –

and never tell my grandmother why I never called –

never called to say that I thought of her daily –

that I suffered with the weight of what she had freely given –

many nights before this one I wondered what she thought of that –
what she thought of her youngest grandchild who couldn’t say that many nights before this one I tried to forget that I loved her –

turned the pain of her remembrance to the bitter lie that she could not have loved one such as me and the proof was in the distance –

Window

When I could no longer see a window to jump from

I remembered the boy, 19, bound so he could not see the other two.
When we realised it was only we who remained

he called to us in Creole, “You do not know how to die. See how to die.”

As though I had seen the charred yellow soles of his feet myself, as though I had walked him to the stake myself.

By a great effort he twisted his body in his bonds, sat down,

and placing his feet in the flames, let them burn without uttering a groan.

I remembered him for the rest of my life

which is to say I followed him through the smoke as though someone had untied his wrists,