(for Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert)
“Just breathe,” I said to my wife as she rubbed
her eyes and looked down the throat of the estuary,
choked with red algae, Karenia brevis, the beauty
of its bloom dulled by our knowledge of its toxins,
fed by pollution as far away as the Mississippi
and as near as Indian River, water laden with poisons
that seep into sea grass, into the lungs of manatees,
flesh of sharks, carapaces of crabs–victims of our hunger,
our quest for “gold, sugar, rum,” the mantra repeated
by a griot, who scrawled crowns of the dispossessed
on walls of the city that slept on the banks of the Hudson,
his grief for black bodies, disposable as sea
turtles, washed up on the sand, gasping for air–
the debris of empires that litter our shores.
________
Born in Jamaica, Geoffrey Philp is the author of the novel, Garvey’s Ghost. His work is represented in nearly every major anthology of Caribbean literature, and he is one of the few writers whose work has been published in the Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories and Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. Philp lives in Miami, Florida, and is currently working on a collection of poems, “Letter from Marcus Garvey.”
________
