Exile

Exile

Original Text
Blue (Vancouver: Polestar Book Publishers, 2001): 25.
for Kwame Dawes
1   Your scuttled pays floats -- fiery -- in the ether;
2Blazing, it vomits smudge-smoke. Your mind chars
3Black because you yaw –- moth-like -– too near flames.
4You douse your dream-scorched brain with slave-sweat rum --
5The only gold you can own, corroding
6Your liver. Your anthem plays to gunfire.
7   When you think about it (when you can breathe) –-
8After all the lies that frame nostalgia,
9All the dead faces that occupy photographs,
10All the slain lovers pitched into ditches,
11Your eyes itch and ache with water, then dry –-
12Curling like dead leaves, starving for gold fire.

Notes

1] pays: country Back to Line
3] yaw: swerve from side to side. Back to Line
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2004
Special Copyright

<b>This poem cannot be published anywhere without the written consent of George Elliott Clarke or the Polestar Book permissions department.</b>