Kamau
For Kamau Brathwaite
For Kamau,
for the furtive sound
of his phonaesthetic exegesis,
for his secret technology
of liquid textology,
the seppy,
pure energy
seducing the ear,
lancing the plane of sight.
And if vision is righteous and holy and pure,
then Baba you was the sonic sage,
the one who never kept
silent,
the one who never wear
necktie yet.
The one who never knelt
and wept
in pews. The one who
wove beads of triplet notes
with the trumpet in his throat—the infinite muse
—a bad and contagious poet!
Perceptible only in a glance, inevitable, emerging
dressed in black, much blacker than black/surrealist conflict.
And I’ve been a black surrealist
ever since I saw my grandfather
chuck the wheel of his Austin Cambridge
with a rock
so it don’t roll
down hill and simple into the sea,
because iron don’t float.
I ran between vine and root,
leapt over the wire, where the land rushed wild
to the east.
I picked the fruit still warm from the vine.
So much hairy snake and picker bush
was tying up the land.
Come on, flash your costume.
Flash your rage.
Poet, play sailor mas.
Play jab jab.
Play junkanoo.
Play rukatuk
music.
Play with fife and bones and fiddle and flute.
Play Moko Jumbie, dance the juba,
with the hands akimbo.
Play stickman
and bust they carapace.
Play mud mas, plot your route,
piss blood, piss rum.
Wear the brazen breastplate
and the burnt wooden mask from the upper volta.
Wear pins in the mouth like a tailor
carving a map of Africa
on the corner
of an island.
Play kaiso, play calypso,
play socalypso, play rapso.
Play jazz
like a second skin.
Reel you in, reel you in.
I carried my
black surrealist manifesto,
between elbows
like fetish to poison wounds
in the bronze plateau of the Congo.
Read me in, read me in
Brooklyn warehouse space,
no running water, no hot heat, no light,
but Fanon!Fanon!Fanon!Fanon!
Read you in, read you in.
I read you in every squall and bawl of the hurricane.
Write this in—
the distance, write this on
the wind
write this on
the waves.
Write this in
fragments
under islands,
write this in each trace of diaspora,
write this in every stone flung across the ocean
blooming into
Islands!Islands!Islands!
May you return if possible
as a gray bearded afronaut,
emerge again
as a secret color,
emerge again
deep teacher
as wizard, as hawk
or blackbird
as if you fell from the stars
or emerged from the rainforest whole.
Come on, swing your horn,
swing your horn and flash your second skin,
flail and flash your color,
omen, O omen of jumbie,
see-er man, obeah man,
obeah man who can make remote vision of people with psycho spiritual camera the next day tell you
exactly what you was wearing, what bone you was chewing at your kitchen table the night before.
Come on, cast speaking serpents out,
flash your beacon,
be bold,
be something else
and on the first day, of the first week,
of the first year after your death
I come with real
fire
this year.
Notes:
This poem is part of the folio “Freed Verse: A Reckoning of Black British Poets.” Read the rest of the folio in the September 2025 issue.
Source: Poetry (September 2025)