BELOW are the first poem­two poems from Cyril Dabydeen's book COASTLAND" NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

A VISIT TO INDIA

1
A place I have never been to before,
but intrigued about since childhood.
Bihar or Mumbai, as the indenture spirit
is at a standstill: archives in me
as I make much ado about history,
or being a gymnast late at night with
images from The Royal Reader.
Tigers roaming, elephants marauding,
Shakuntala again pouring out with rain.

Where my ancestors have come from,
I pretend to acknowledge or not understand,
having denied other places from times past,
or living with lore of the Amazon instead:
evergreen forests bolstering a greenhouse
effect as environmentalists talk loudest.

2
Now in Ottawa in an Indian restaurant
with a Mexican name, the waitress takes in
Chandra Mohan, our Indian guest in authentic
attire, who mutters about Chairs of Canadian Studies
in India, or ways of making Canadian Literature
better known to a billion people there, all
in Delhi, Calcutta or Chennai, and where else?
Now James Reaney's an institution, he adds,
though he likes Margaret Atwood best.

So I ask, Why the interest in Canada?
Indeed it's about Rudy Weibe's Big Bear,
Robert Kroetsch's post-modernism,
or language-use in the Prairies, while I come
to grips with a tropical itch, being
foreign-born and mulling over ways
of coping with identity in Canada.

3
Post-colonialism strides I contemplate
with Nehru's jewel-in-the-crown test or tryst
with destiny, Empire being what my forefathers took
less seriously while I'm here in the Great White North:
a Susanna Moodie frontier in me,
as I claim to be a drawer of water and hewer
of wood, or dwell on a garrison state because
of the giant neighbour to the south,
survival instincts merely--

Imagining continents that were once together,
as metaphors indeed make the world one;
and I again conjure up images like false truths,
reinstating Mowgli because of Kipling,
being astride an elephant and trundling along
in a jungle safari with mahout shouts,
blowing my horn because the British had been
in India longest.

Now self-contained with aspirations
or a further quest, I think about what might
have been in Jaipur or Shimla, or some other place
unknown to me while yet being a maharajah
in an exotic wilderness.

ELEPHANTS MAKE GOOD STEPLADDERS
It isn't the same as growing up
On a different side of the tropics­

After all they are worlds apart,
Even though I've been accustomed to hearing

About India's tigers­
Not elephants.

How I wished for more than youthful
Visits to circuses in a colonial town:

To hear real elephant's grunt,
To watch its trunk come alive­

To climb with stepladder ease
As I am in the heart of the jungle:

This more than TV Wonderland or Disneyworld,
]The trunk lifts up, lowers--

Water pours out as if from the clouds;
With Shakuntala innocence

I experience the thrill of monsoon magic.
Hands folded, I contemplate the subcontinent's

Pastime flood; bending forward,
Water at my knees--

I meet the elephant eye to eye.

RECONCILIATION

Ubuntu: "I am human because I belong. I participate, I share."
Bishop Desmond Tutu

We become who we are or are meant to be,
In a time of our difference no less. Let Mandela's words
Be heard again, from afar or close up, or with Gandhi's
Own "silken cord of love": fortitude and forgiveness are all
Because of a Godhead as we renew faith with dignity
Despite skin-colour, race, or ethnic identity bringing us
Closer without political manouverings or stratagems.
We hearken with passive or peaceful resistance:
Satyagraha or "soul-force," the Mahatma's own preference
At the heart of a struggle begun in the Transvaal and Johannesburg
Influenced by Ruskin, Thoreau, Tolstoy, or a Muslim faith
No less in search of unity, or the revered Bhagavada Gita
As all faiths become one; realization or consciousness
Of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s distinct ways:
This peace with valour above all else...which we hold dear!

The spirit's own quest beyond prevarication, I say,
As we continue to call for reconciliation, in order to live
In a better world; and a greater force it will be with Mandela's
Ubuntu spirit: a way to genuinely forge peace and forgiveness;
This sanctity with nations everywhere, despite upheavals.
Indeed with Bishop Tutu's "bundle of life," we strive to end
Oppression and rise up with spiritual force, or a destiny fashioned
In Mandela's Robben Island prison cell: the struggle against
Apartheid knowing no end; but with love's shining example,
This Allah or Brahma I discover with my own dark night of the soul,
Or the living self's errant ways, determined as we are in Africa,
Asia, Canada, or continents elsewhere, to move ahead in a new
Millennial time or our future's sacrosanct age.

Well known Guyanese born author and poet, Cyril Dabydeen, is a former Poet Laureate of Ottawa, Canada. This p[oem read at the National Library of Canada on Feb. 12/02 to mark "Global Reconciliation in a New Era" re Black History Month.

FLIGHT
By Cyril Dabydeen

Flying into the Cheddi Jagan International Airport
in a moment of time with talk of love,
or a new destiny it seems like,
ceremonies beginning all over.

A further beating of the breast,
or imagining people in throes
because of where we've come from
with emblems close to the heart

Falsifying the ground as Arawaks and Caribs
look out without memory or pain;
only the curare of instincts, the arrow
bent into the shape of a rainbow.

I take stock of a country with all regions
as one from this Canada, this cold North,
or a journey with the sense of genesis,
so to speak, breathing in harder--

Making much ado of zinnia,
frangipani; the toucan staring back
with large eyes; a hummingbird doing
an acrobatic dance of its own

Above the eucalyptus; the stinking-toe
tree in a gust of trade wind.
Promises I keep to myself
as the races combine or simply mix.

All new states we now call a country:
one people with a destiny to uphold,
hopes we cherish because of timehri
shaped by crossings that I truly behold

While considering places my own,
the imagination's no less; strident voices
in me still echoing with time to outlast,
or what will never be the same again.

(From 'Poem in Hemisphere of Love'--a new collection released. Read at the National Library of Canada, in Ottawa, on World Poetry Day, March 21, event organized by UNESCO for the "Poetry of the Americas" occasion.)