By Sasenarine Persaud

This day I bring you a language
we would come to love
and vow to best the English at -
from Oxford. Should you have
made America your home. Or laugh:
I have been here since the British
brought tea from Asia, coffee from
Africa. And desperately needing
that sweetener from India; King cane
sugar. Or Maharaj chini? The way
a girlfriend visiting from Trinidad
uttered it, her name, her father's name,
with a laughter I hear today. Could you
accept this, and the rain just over
playing teen-taal on the zinc roof
or the katak dance we celebrated
that August, sitting on the beach
nudging sand on the Atlantic:
this might be our Ganga our Goa
beach littered with hip tourists
looking out somewhere to Barbados
or England. Or straight to the plains
of Uttar Pradesh chanting the Hanuman
Chalisa: Shri Guru Charan Saroj Raj
Nij Man Mukur Sudhari
With the dust of guru's lotus feet
I first clean the mirror of my heart

Not fragments ­ but the entire
Chalisa, as we did only last Sunday
here in a Mandir in Florida. No
wire story from Stockholm or
England, or America mentioning
how Hanuman's House was built ­
or caring where he located that leaf
of life mountain - north of Piarco
airport, the Catskill, Vancouver -
Hanuman the improviser:
if he couldn't recognize The Leaf in
the mountain, then bring the entire
mountain to the battlefield to cure
Lakshman's wounds. Hanuman's
descendants learning well, that August

Celebrating Janam Ashtmee:
birth night of Krishna: lover, god
warrior, philosopher ­ a memory
of a history beyond grand-ajas
and ajies, a history you left behind
forgotten with your grandfather ­
for British Publishing Houses ­
we were celebrating: we could
write the Ramayan in Hindi, in
Devnagari script from cover to cover
if we wanted. We wanted space
and quiet in that crowd, steal a touch
an ancient kiss of eyes around our
friends. A slice of ripe spice mango
from an ancient UP village
or the bittersweet fruit green, with
a touch of salt and pepper, or
ground into a sweethot chatney -
I could bring you some from Trinidad

Trinidad is sweet, she said, come
you'll love it. O we don't have these
hugh rivers you have here in
your grand Guyana, your grand South
America ­ but El Dorado don't have me

To bring thanks to England for Language
India for history and culture and other
countries in the subcontinent ­ this last
for wife? Or as Selvon would say West
Indianly ­ for pussy. But nothing of
those Plains of Caroni, or Port-of-Spain.
Nothing of that land which nurtured
seeds of grandfather, father, mother's
fruit budded. Land I never visited but
loved and love ­ how could you not ­

Trinidad is sweet, she said, sweet
sweet sweet - I just came back and
didn't want to. When are you going?
At least once, once - a Noble Address.
Is this too much to ask, find, expect?

Nine, and I could have said "son."
Nine and we walked through puddles
danced under rain-gutters, listened
to the drip of raindrops
on galvanized zinc roofs. Not tears
of an unstrange stranger far away.

I passed your way once, twice
a dozen times spellbound with
a coast once home, and
still ­ goated brown grass, cowdung
drying in the sun, sweet green pastures
in the rain, sheep and ramshackle
rusting roofs. It is not the same

as yours. Tonight I cannot dream
of a mother sonless, or the red patch
on a bicycle tube neat ­ vulcanized.
A word I thought never to hear again.

Nine: roving the Atlantic seashore
from Campbellville, to Kitty to the old
Dutch roundhouse ­ or Montrose
searching for speckled shells, the
sharp bite of a sherriga. What were
hands doing in crabholes? To laugh
and weep and dream. We shall change
our world ­ you yours, except for men
who punctured tubes, things; your
head punctured, brains gathering

At the back ­ a long blackness to
twenty-five you'll never know. If
we can record what transpired
in those pseudo socialist nights
when we slept with cutlasses under
beds: if these are times for guns
times we do not know anymore ­
Gandhi making salt when not making
salt was immoral ­ make salt make salt

Make roaches coming out the burnham
closet ­ or mausoleum. Land I loved
again overcrawled by armed
jumbies. And a voice, a Can
come back From Toronto gone sour
grapes rotting in a Demerara night.
Where your voice ­ all you have
now conscience given to roaches.

Twenty-five and no dictator could stop
us changing the world except that
bullet. Walking the once backdams
of once Sophia estate ­ where my father
planted cane and then chopped them
down when burnt. An alligator chasing
him once ­ mother protecting her
young. Those backdams we walked
quietly : raags of birds and leaves ­
looking for tall, straight bamboos
for a wedding or puja ­ and what flies

So quickly from that calm backdam:
cowards to Toronto ­ a cold you come
to love and hate and love and hate at
forty-one. Jagan dead, a promise lost,
a people sold. And you would not go back,
not go back to a life once yours, your
community, country turning its back

Except for few. You are after all
too calm, too dead
too far away, too safe to roar
or thunder ­ and you wonder how
can such a people forget the thunder
of a tropical downpour ­ or Carter.

Nine. I might have a bullet
in my head. Yes, and dead undead
and do not need your money now
but compensation, ah compensation ­
like: put a bounty on their heads, put
a bounty on their heads, put a bounty
on their heads, and remain calm

As calm as a Bengal tiger cornered
growling: rather than cut my body
cut this land I loved ­ take half
this land I loved for bounty -
Jahajidesh Jahajidesh Jahajidesh

O land O home O country
I cannot have - if we cannot
live together, and we cannot

Far away, far, far away unstrange
stranger ending a Florida drought ­
these drops not rain on paper ­ if
you could be, once, twenty-five or
forty-one or nine again - I will come
home if I come home to a free
state ­ to a Jahajidesh. Or will
this all have been in vein ­ president
lawyer, rabble-rouser, poet, politician

Sasenarine Persaud is a Guyanese born published poet, author and literary theorist who resides in Florida.