Jamaican Elegy For An Intellectual (Rex. R. Nettleford) Part 1

One time a barefooted pickney dancing on the street I beat puhn pan an' wanda how life could be sweet For my yai quadrilled to distant cling-cling roost and feel A longing to change their parliament in my zeal I climb down my Martha Brae to ancient salt of sea And scoured the land in spate in search of jubilee The river flows winding and make twist and turn Make me conform to the land, and more my hunger yearn I quadrille like pitcherie from logwood to gaungo tree I read Tom Redcam, but it was Flameheart that captured me Dancing for tourist on the pivotal syllable of history O you betta know how my river flow, know this legacy River say RIP Martha Brae man, river come for you Big hungry belly, dutty river, bway, it hungry for true Lift me up to London Tower, keep my head and power Watch me river rise and bring the mountain lower Keep this legacy in memory, black child come to history-mumma Ponder awhile the mento man playing for my mother's children On the tourist boulevard, feel the futility like a dime in the liver Fenced out by taboos and laws, my yai pining after that heaven I learn to build my house behind zinc fence, brick by brick Out of the social memory, out of the oral sand. The trick Was the forbidden thing, the thing the enemy I did know Feared I would find, and finding my pearl I would glow. O did you see me dance that joy, it was so almost heaven I kumina, I rastaman, I poco bway, from mento to reggae Making new edifice out of the forbidden and almost forgotten I rising red in spate carrying in my gut the Martha Brae Where was my Ebenezer, meagre dawg tief mi bone What shall I do with eloquence when hungry belly on the throne Tell them it is not so, this Rex Nettleford is not dead Tell the them this native son sleeps in the river bed Tell them I taught you your first poem when poem was silent When stare at the Carib theatre like a Naboth's garden Because it was ours, but who were but the ascribed sediment Our names were the excuse for things done in heaven But our lives were hell with no vision, no racial pride And so from canefields to rum bars we staggered, we cried But every river begins in a meagre foot poem first Watch it swell, rain come down, and thunderhead burst