from The Arrivants: A
New World Trilogy
from Islands, Part IV: Possession
III
Ancestors
I
Every
Friday morning my grandfather
left his
farm of canefields, chickens, cows,
and rattled
in his trap down to the harbour town
to sell his
meat. He was a butcher.
Six-foot-three
and very neat: high collar,
winged, a
grey cravat, a waistcoat, watch-
chain just
above the belt, thin narrow-
bottomed
trousers, and the shoes his wife
would
polish every night. He drove the trap
himself: slap
of the leather reins
along the
horse’s back and he’d be off
with a
top-hearted homburg on his head:
black
English country gentleman.
Now he is
dead. The meat shop burned,
his
property divided. A doctor bought
the horse.
His mad Alsatians killed it.
The wooden
trap was chipped and chopped
by friends
and neighbours and used to stop-
gap fences
and for firewood. One yellow
wheel was
rolled across the former cowpen gate.
Only his
hat is left. I ‘borrowed’ it.
I used to
try it on and hear the night wind
man go
battering through the canes, cocks waking up and thinking
it was dawn
throughout the clinking country night.
Great
caterpillar tractors clatter down
the broken
highway now; a diesel engine grunts
where pigs
once hunted garbage.
A thin
asthmatic cow shares the untrashed garage.
1969
Source of the text – Edward Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
TJB: Après moi le déluge: the poet elegizes the utter dismantling of his grandpa’s world—hard, rural, colorful—replaced by progress or whatever.
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