KAMAU BRAITHEWAITE, “MY POETRY,” DECEMBER 6, 1996, WASHINGTON, DC

Sourced from the Cultura América Latina y el Caribe archive on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDFQOGSgSPw

Until it come to the time for the great myriad bird, the mystery, to begin its ascent, its challenge against the earth, the paradoxical oracle of wind, wings beating, unchaining, outboarding as seaman might say, the great breast ruffled and rising as in all the great legends. But this happening here, before me, under me now, wonderfully surrounding me, the white silver louvered feather shift and chevron, stretching out across the sunlight, the great terrible beauty and beating we have always heard about, beating, beating upward and forward, the planks of its shape shivering at first like a ship, like a dowel then settling down into smooth as we move upwards.

Now the first hills at the darker mountains of English, the sea below all silver like our shadow, the beacon topaz eyes unblinking even through all the shudder, the wings now stretched across all space openly and awesomely so that we are not beating anymore. But, ah, sailing, sailing, something like singing, because at last I have been able to use all the words in the language as long as I lay them out softly and carefully, like these unfluttering feathers of song, like the sea below turning into a gray ball without fishes, like the darkness no longer lingering above us, but we moving towards it as part of its fuse and its future, the Ayesha of sails one last time in our airs, the earth gone a long time now, green spur arrogance of John Crow mountain.

Strange, not even the memory of a carefree river in these places, too far up now for sunsets, through all this rain and silence on our eyes, on our cheeks, on our faces.

The metaphor at last a float, Almost a light in the darkness, a light in the darkness, a light in the darkness