Christmas Edition 2020 – selection of poems from Jamaica and New Zealand

This year’s Meeting Ground Christmas edition features the works of poets from New Zealand and Jamaica. For this first instalment, the featured Jamaican poets are in the diaspora but born and mostly raised in Jamaica. In their work is the dialogue between the Jamaican Christmas past and the American Christmas present, reminding us, too, of Claude McKay’s “Flame Heart”, with the poinsettias red, blood-red in warm December. Here’s to a heart-warming Christmas and blissful reading!

– Ann-Margaret Lim (Jamaica)

Kia Ora (Welcome in Maori). It is a great pleasure for us poets in New Zealand to be sharing poetry and Manawa (Breath) with our brothers and sisters in Jamaica at this time of the year. We share so much common ground in our island nations – the love of the sea, mountains and friendly faces. Thank you so much for sharing with us. Arohanui (much love and deep affection).

– Shane Hollands. (New Zealand)

ANOTHER WHITE CHRISTMAS IN VIRGINIA

The house at the end of my street

has been looming all winter.

Perched garishly through this sour

season, pepper-lights slinking red,

gold in its wake, heralding the sign

of its own coronation, its million

chittering fires, Chevy-pickup colony

declaring the sidewalk. This their own

white sky, old names they refuse to bury.

The whole yard a boisterous spectacle.

I long to set fire to all of it. The glimmering

reindeer, fat snowman inflating his visible

lung, ghost child ringing his one hoarse

bell through the night. That bright harassment

of Santas. The idea of America burning

holes in the lawn. Who could live here?

With enough mirth to power my city,

enough of myself haunting me in some

other place. Nonetheless. One matchstick

man comes and goes on their horizon,

walking hard on his invisible horse,

Confederate buckle-stroke kicking,

toothpick silences. No words ever pass

between us as he hoists and pulleys

his large flag, daily hanging and freezing

through the verbless rubble of these

months, determined as an eagle. Clawing

at its steady rituals. Don’t tread on me.

Still I am resolved to come friendly, built

and nested my cowboy greeting, torched it out

into this world and watched it choke

soundless, die with my good foot caught

in their blue hydrangeas. The hawk-wife watching.

Spies me smiling, waving in their driveway

of angels, swoops up her children

and says nothing, but retreats from

some darkening on the horizon,

some fast approaching plaque.

– Safiya Sinclair (Jamaican living in the United States) Cannibal: winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry Published in 2016 by University of Nebraska press

Brisbane Snap

Brisbane,

frame it round with fridge magnets,

glitter-glue its Xmas to your calendar.

The spray-on Santa snow has sunstroke,

the skin cancer clinic’s boiled over and gone feral,

but endless waves are curling in,

lyrically,

and their blue fathoms are freckled with light.

– David Eggleton, New Zealand Poet Laure ate, Time of the Icebergs, Otago University Press: 2010

GIRL AT CHRISTMAS

For all she’s gladdened: milk

dreaming love in one hand;

clefts of clementine stain

the other. They cannot die;

the coral joy and battering

ceramic, the peach bones

and Scotch bonnet seeds;

the sorrel, and foil mask she then puts

on to belt her savage choir.

- Ishion Hutchinson

(Jamaican in the US)

House of Lords and Commons

Farrar Straus Giroux, N.Y.: 2016

Advent Sequence

If I knew

the month

of angels

I would write

a small canticle

to be sung with bells

at ten to ten

to fix the mind

to hold the words

I found

Wings ~ sometimes

the softest feathers

fall from them

two or three

light as moons

on those

very still

nights

The three donkeys will soon be in demand

with their warm grey backs and sensible heads

The dogs are roaming the beach

They have found roasted lambs tails

and think Christmas has come early

Ewe’s milk is new at the market today

and plums and summer spinach

These little hands

in this petunia season

paint stars

and moons

and trees

– Jenny Dobson

(New Zealand)

DECEMBER EVENING

December evening.

Something in the air

in a red rose given; something

is going to happen. What? Who?

A visitor from a past life, mists

ancient mysteries unfolding through

a chance remark blown in from the street,

a book picked up from random through which

the scent of lemons, burnished rinds

of tangerines bring whispers of a place,

whorls of memories leaving trails

of restless pleasure on a quiet evening.

The end of the year

weighs us down, a flat lake

shrouding the brain, body,

grey webs of languor, ennui.

In cities far away bare trees

hang sketchily in the dusk.

A fire casts its glow where

someone is reading. Here

the glow of a December evening

showers gold on the garden, turning

simple leaves into amber pendants

nestling at the throat of the day.

The moon and the year

are waning. Inauspicious signs.

Yet dawn shows green shoots

beside amputated banana stumps.

Sorrel and gungo hang gossiping

over the fence and a rose,

inexpertly pruned hides a bud,

baby-fisted in curled, new leaves.

– Christine Craig

(Jamaican in the US)

All Things Bright & Quadrille for Tigers

Peepal Tree Press: 2010