☀ Today's Poem: "Turn and Live" Anthony Vahni Capildeo

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December 13, 2024

The sacrifice got up off the altar.
BECOME AN ARCHAEOLOGIST OF YOUR LUNGS.
Windrush
is the name of a ship
not of a generation
Windrush
is the name of a ship
not of any situation
Windrush
is the witchcraft name of a ship
waterlining us into uncharted, obligatory, and perpetual migration
The sacrifice got up off the altar.
BECOME AN ARCHAEOLOGIST OF YOUR LUNGS.
The naming of ships is a terrible thing,
The Terrible Mother tell me.
I came in a ship called
Threat Vector
I came in a ship called
Dust to Dust
Who came in a ship called
Willing Ambassador
Who came in a ship called
Evidence of Funds
Did I dance with you on the blue carpet?
Was your ship called the Providence?
The Invitation? Was your ship called Guerilla Diplomacy?
Go back where you came from, citizens,
Says Terrible Motherland,
whether that means overseas
or going back under the sea,
citizens, life forms.
Listen to the lady, she is a consultant anonymizer,
A high-mobility native of Fortress Trolley.
We are phantasmagorically, primarily, and politically
lightless and all-bearing creatures
put down, not undrowned, gone beyond
beyond drowned
The sacrifice got up off the altar.
BECOME AN ARCHAEOLOGIST OF YOUR LUNGS.
A woman is sweeping the sea.
In the father’s words, in Kamau’s words,
a woman is sweeping the sea.
They still say in English
a ship is a ‘she’?
Who say so? The ship is
a thing of itness
witness and creator
fury of a wake
raking over of witness
The island scholar is sweeping the carpet
in her London digs
sweeping the sea-grey, the pea-souper carpet
in no-blacks no-Irish no-dogs London’s aspirational digs
that carpet had etiquette, it demanded her to accept it
in its misty itness, as grey, grey like ethical practice, dove-or-pigeon grey.
Could the island scholar
trust loose-talking fibre
after she study the French liberator
Charles de Gaulle
Who dismissed our archipelago
as specks of dust?
She sweeps and a pattern emerges
stabilizing as many colours
stabilizing as a miracle
a many-coloured pattern wanting to dance beside her feet
after she was forced to breathe in dust
settling and unsettling
the miracle of many colours
The sacrifice got up off the altar.
BECOME AN ARCHAEOLOGIST OF YOUR LUNGS.

from the book POLKADOT WOUNDS / Carcanet Press

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Forward

"Turn and Live" was written for the Royal Society of Literature "Windrush 75 In Verse" R.A.P. Party (2023), commemorating twentieth-century Caribbean people "returning" by invitation to their imperial homeland, the UK. The poem references Kamau Brathwaite, and my parents’ 1950s London life. The title, a quotation from the book of Ezekiel, is a hat-tip to the Prior of Blackfriars Cambridge (UK)’s preaching in August 2022. "Turn" can also mean "repent."
Anthony Vahni Capildeo on "Turn and Live"

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What Sparks Poetry:
Mary-Alice Daniel on Object Lessons
"Science is one language articulating the esoteric fabric of spacetime. Verse is another valence. Astrophysics and poetry pair prettily. Both concern themselves with the behavior and spectacle of celestial bodies; with the margins of massive matters alongside the infinitesimal; the inconceivable infinite. Dreamers in the two disciplines speculate alternate & extra dimensions. We enlist anomaly. We trouble in stasis. We peer into—across—the reality tunnel: the entangled expanse between what you see and I perceive."

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