African Writers Series - Graveyad

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Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- [from The Graveyard Also Has Teeth

(1980)]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- [from The Graveyard Also Has Teeth

(1980)]
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Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- The Graveyard also has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems
Cambridge 2006
ProQuest Information and Learning
African Writers Series
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Bibliographic details for the Source Text

Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- (1945-) The Graveyard also has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems
London
Heinemann 1980
119 p.
© Syl Cheney-Coker 1973 and 1980
Preliminaries omitted.
AWS series number: 221
First published: London
First published by: Heinemann
First published: 1980
Language of original publication: English
First published in the African Writers Series in: 1980
ISBN: 0435902210
[Page ]
THE GRAVEYARD ALSO HAS TEETH
0-collections.chadwyck.co.uk.wam.seals.ac.za/display/printView.do 1/89
[Page ]
Main text
[Page 1 ]
Concerto For An Exile
[Page 3 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : PREFACE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 Venomous songs! Venomous love!
2 There is no sweeter song to death than the perfect concerto for love
3 A gypsy woman's flamenco sang in my soul!
4 But song by itself is no fertile language for death
5 Words?
6 Words too can be sacrilegious. I learnt that from Christ at Calvary

7 The souls he has dismembered!
8 Wishing to explain my death, this terrain stinking of my filth

9 walk on it if you dare you stand to lose your head!
10 It takes the savage language of a kick

11 to cure the heart of its persistent follies

12 That is, there is a beautiful splendour about violence
13 A violence the word has coloured with too much muck
14 and then?
15 Passion!
16 A force contemptuous of reason.
17 The nightingale sings of his sorrow

18 the moon his lover in her tipsiness demands and end to the dirge
19 but then to misquote Zweig, to judge a soul carried away by passion
20 would be as ridiculous as to call a storm to account or to bring
21 a lawsuit against a volcano
22 my omnivorous heart? If you entered it yesterday
[Page 4 ]
23 you would have died of the muck the world deposited there!
24 Ah! but it's closed to all smiles.
25 Why?
26 The tree of agony wickedly planted in my soul!
27 It has three branches but I refuse to tell

28 what they are because I stand innocent of my death!
29 Ah! what stubborn head (especially mine) has ever resisted

30 the treachery of love? A love with too many holes
31 is no savoury dish. My proof?
32 The pine-needles in my eyes. That taste of love;

33 it is too bitter, too bitter I say!
34 Ah walk on my terrain if you dare

35 you stand to lose your head and your soul too!
36 Warning to all innocent hearts

37 failing which you stand to be deceived!
[Page 5 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE TRAVELLER [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
For Tchicaya U Tam'si
1 I limp with you on every road of your passion

2 Creole and Congolese regiments of the dead
3 I seek not my tomorrow my heart weighs me down
4 I bleed with carcinoma in my soul
5 I plunder my head with joy and kill the millepedes of my race
6 the blood upon my hands is nothing but the rotten phlegm from my nose
7 the philanthropists the beautiful assassins

8 the miserable blacks wanted a new race
9 despite the warnings in meteors of blazing sun
10 that planting metamorphous souls
11 inside the obedient belly of the soil was germicidal rot
12 the sea awaited the expedition the sea awaited the negroes
13 and hungrily swallowed them for delight the sea swallowed the stars
14 the moon in agony with the filth spat at the desolate voyagers
15 and warned that such outrage could provoke the nemesis of the sea
16 papaloas of the plantations

17 they raped the flora and fauna of the land
18 the birds danced in orgy with the voyagers the birds danced with the stars
19 I got my disgrace from that first rape
20 so tragic was it that the world had a radioactive fit
21 O my Portuguese conquistador
22 do not speak to me about my genealogy
23 a slaver's knife chewed my umbilical cord
24 twenty-five drops of my blood Pedro da Cinta
25 1462 means nothing to me the sea to rock the belly
[Page 6 ]
26 was I captain of the ship William Wilberforce

27 what monument shall I build to you inside my soul
28 then that soul my heart my soul of iron and nails!

29 which one was weak enough to permit this bleeding in my life
30 my soul too open too trusting to resist the treachery of love---
31 having known love I lost my soul in the flames
32 thorns too visible in my smile I come to Quebec

33 trying to forget that Argentine bird who fled with my soul
34 that senorita fled with my soul on her chariot of flames Lady Medea
35 listen I groan with Jason loving her in my wounds
36 my anguish equals his, chorus of Corinths
37 Zeus your Medea my virago my ruthless Cristina!
38 I longed to carve my child upon that woman's womb ...
39 oh I write a poem in solitude with the night
40 solitude my destiny stay solitude stay

41 for tonight happiness might make love to me
42 and I shall forget the tree of agony planted in my soul
43 that tree with branches of gervas upon which my Argentine bird laughs!
[Page 7 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : HYDROPATHY [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 Go on laugh
2 at my ancestry
3 which put the sickness
4 in my head beautiful
5 like the sea
6 which vomited me out!
7 I think of Sierra Leone

8 and my madness torments me
9 all my strange traditions
10 the plantation blood in my veins
11 my foul genealogy!
12 I laugh at this Creole ancestry
13 which gave me my negralized head
14 all my polluted streams
15 not one river shedding its pain
16 to cleanse me behind this bush of thorns
17 then seeing me clean scars off my back
18 or this lewd head hydropathy and soiled
19 not screaming in delirium about my rape
20 one summer's rape gave me life

21 the sperm in the grass stinks of my filth
22 behind that grass fiery with occult
23 three women of neurotic sex
24 splashing their cunts with the licentious blood
25 of female copperheads pissed on my soul
26 all my body transformed into oxidized death
27 it was seen in the swelling of my head
28 that my flesh will be carrion for the jackals
29 when they dance behind the bush of armoured thorns
30 they dance to our mourning there in Freetown
31 I dance with them here in exile
[Page 8 ]
32 feet deep in my heart

33 all my limbs thrust against the acid wind
34 if blade will sharpen that wind
35 imagine my alcoholic head at dance
36 but from what plantation
37 and from what people my rum
38 in my country the Creoles drink only
39 Black and White with long sorrows
40 hanging from their colonial faces!
[Page 9 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE CRUCIFIED [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 Deserted and betrayed

2 my heart beats heavy in its pain
3 it feels the love which weighs
4 it down. Love, sweet, bitter
5 passion, hot as the Chinese revolution!
6 The night is foul its equinox my bitter days

7 the hounds baying at the moon have less rage than the hurricane in my heart
8 to see the hounds at bark the night knows the fire preparing my deaths
9 O night, O planet, my miserable horizon!
10 now I die now I live the cyclical sadness

11 groaning by a river where I drop my pus of death
12 to live in harmony with my dead voyagers
13 my deaths will be slow, the assassins be rewarded
14 what faggots they will burn upon my flesh
15 so that I shall learn in suffering, so that I shall learn in dying
16 that love by the heart and the flesh makes the embers in my eyes
17 the love which bleeds from the heart is the purest of all
18 laughed a woman in my life! the winter my nightmare laughed with her
19 reading Borges and Neruda

20 I torture myself the knife from an Argentine's hand
21 and sometime last winter waiting for love in vain
22 I killed the phallus in me
23 thus I wish to live the obedient eunuch
24 loving only those who set fire to my flesh
25 the fire in the well my eyes is it by you

26 that I have the nightmares in my sleep
[Page 10 ]
27 the nightmares which winnow the sleep from my eyes

28 sending me into the world of those who sleep with heads upside down
29 the strange sleep of the centaurs because in life, life transformed them
30 into demons, because in death death transformed them into dragons:
31 my monstrous voyagers!
32 ah I have the nightmares in my sleep

33 the storms which make the tremors in my sleep
34 night my derision, night my florescence
35 are these all there are to it
36 these dead flowers in my soul
37 or this desire festooning my head with three devices
38 sewn by the amazon who comes to me brandishing the flame
39 she puts on my soul?
40 certain visions have been seen

41 there is too much agony in me to want to live tomorow
42 there is my river flowing with blood
43 also what do I have to offer but my nose
44 which makes the phlegm filth of Sierra Leone
45 the stench of politics and love is lascivious in my belly
46 Oh! nail me to my cross, the two thieves also, I am they

47 my three deaths, one for myself, one for my people, and one for Sierra Leone
48 and to you my brothers while you watch these deaths

49 prepare to burn your degrees and other academic shit
50 tomorrow will be rough armed with peasants' teeth
51 I have seen it, poet in agony four years mad
52 walk away from this my bitter terrain down to the path the sea
53 and drink the mad gush of my blood!
[Page 11 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : ANALYSIS [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 I am in my room observing my record player covered with dust

2 my mountainous library from Brecht to Zola
3 Pushkin is absent killed in a duel for love
4 as they die everywhere poets without honour
5 across the hall Mike snores ferociously
6 because the landlady let him sleep without his rent
7 outside the summer smothers the day
8 the humidity of the summer pissed through the leaves

9 of every tree ... if I dodge the heat tell me which lake
10 to cool my rage? lying to your shadow by day the shadow
11 knows your bright ugliness by night! ah taste the vinegar
12 in the air it has more sweetness than my joy
13 my rage my tears, my groaning, my raving

14 to whom? for whom? to whom I ask?
15 to Africa for permitting a perpetual butchery of her womb

16 to those who barter her on Wall Street and the World market
17 muckrakers, smugglers, politicians and the like
18 to know them by their smiles Wall Street buys your heart!
19 think of your agony Africa your capitalist war-mongers
20 those long queues your children straddled strapped to your backs
21 waiting for those who rule who lead you into the makets of slavery
22 do they sell you for the rand or for the dollar?
23 to America whose pulse beats too loudly in my heart

24 your hands your lips your love too vicious to poets
25 your ladies with false eyelashes who kill your poets
26 America think of your involvements
27 those who died with napalm in their eyes
28 were they necessary for your salvation or for your balance of payments?
[Page 12 ]
29 Cuba is alive in spite of your insane blockade

30 the Vietnamese shoot through the eyes although you control the sky
31 I am no water fountain the mucus you have poisoned in my head
32 I die from breathing your air your love is a machine in my heart
33 but I must think of Africa which is obedient to your dollar
34 there after you have seen the filth

35 those who dance under the chandeliers
36 while others coax the stubborn fires in the huts
37 you learn that at the price of sanity
38 you walk with one eye open and the other one shut!
[Page 13 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : MONOLOGUE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 Every dog asleep!
2 I move my bed across the room

3 waiting to catch the night in its flight
4 my alcoholic head revealing my crimes

5 the mucus comes gushing out soiling the arms soiling the soil
6 every hour of these nights torments me

7 the lions roaring in my head leading
8 the tessitura for everyday I live in my rage
9 then it's no longer these vertical nights

10 which frighten me but my life the existential emptiness!
11 paint my horizon black

12 hammer my head with a volley of slugs
13 give my voyagers the stink of rotten cadavers

14 and my heart a continental kick!
15 then how soon this death I plead for every night?
16 it is better that I be gone now

17 I will surely suffer for my crimes
18 and my outrageous kindness also
19 I have insulted the world with my ubiquitous humanism

20 I have kindled the drab oriflamme of ancient religiosity
21 who blames them then for delivering me to my fate?
22 I say paint my horizon black

23 put a pangolin inside my belly
24 let it eat there the bread of deliverance
25 so that I'll be saved from
26 this sour passover that warms my bloated throat
27 I have enjoyed a sumptuous feast

28 cooked with the blood of my Creole ancestors!
[Page 14 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : TOILERS [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 These soothing words

2 for all lazy minds
3 like the clock at noon
4 its hands dulled
5 by improper automation .
6 Every minute a tumour
7 of a volcano poised
8 at the heart of
9 a continent---Africa!
10 a claustrophobia in my room because the sun is in orgasm there!
11 then the dawn then the sickle the axe to smite me

12 because the sun has ejaculated the bad sperm of the drought
13 this drought which is no sieve in my hands

14 a farmer his wife shift the soil shift the sperm
15 the bad sperm of the century curling in their hands the seed the promise
16 with eyes of iguana with head of hippo disappears in the earth
17 to come to life in that woman's womb bursting in flames the savage birth
18 splitting her belly because the woman had waited too long for the dead foetus
19 to cry in that stubborn earth denying her her rest
20 then those who came to watch died from the shock

21 those who came to mourn died from perdition
22 those who came in the ambulance forget their official cards
23 O woman O sorrow our horrible bureaucracy!
24 now the farmer his night following the stupid guidance of the stars
25 with their own laziness smelling of alcohol because the world demands
26 that they be drunk at all times this tyrannical rule from year to year
27 showed the farmer his labour the grass hut his agony
[Page 15 ]
28 his head on the stone bed of his grief

29 cruelly the night brings the farmer his child
30 the bad sperm of the century running through his veins
31 made him lewd poisoning his belly the putrid soil of his belly
32 his skin is peeling off his dog-starved bones
33 and the farmer has fallen asleep vomiting a blond saliva
34 farmer there are so many stupid heads
35 in your dreams gloating with the thirst
36 for black opulence much too afraid to share the sacrifice with you
37 but I am no peasant farmer my name is government

38 and I work in an air-conditioned office with ten telephones
39 my days are limpid with brandy and ginger
40 cruising slovenly at noon to my villa in the restricted zone
41 proudly overlooking the sea
42 and my dogs keep you off my luxuriant lawn
43 inherited from the colonial master
44 and my children are locked up in super elitist schools
45 thus prohibiting the contagion of your diseases
46 yesterday it was independence celebration

47 and we threw in July fourteen as added attraction
48 because ex-British or ex-French we have to pay our obedience
49 howling the logistics about which was best colonial or ourselves
50 forgetting you my source that I made so black
51 now shamelessly I dare to mourn with you

52 with crocodile tears on paper nonsensical to you
53 infuriating your heart
54 farmer I arm myself with my lies

55 predicting your carnage
56 I am no fool I know you demand my skull!
57 but my peasant my sins are too visible and at the end of your uprising
58 dangle my head on your sword the fraternal oppressor!
[Page 16 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : FREETOWN [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 Africa I have long been away from you

2 wandering like a Fulani cow
3 but every night
4 amidst the horrors of highway deaths
5 and the menace of neon-eyed gods
6 I feel the warmth of your arms
7 centrifugal mother reaching out to your sons
8 we with our differnt designs innumerable facets
9 but all calling you mother womb of the earth
10 liking your image but hating our differences
11 because we have become the shame of your race
12 and now on this third anniversary of my flight
13 my heart becomes a citadel of disgust
14 and I am unable to write the poem of your life
15 my creation haunts me behind the mythical dream

16 my river dammed by the poisonous weeds in its bed
17 and I think of my brothers with 'black skin and white masks'
18 (I myself am one heh heh heh )
19 my sisters who plaster their skins with the white cosmetics
20 to look whiter than the snows of Europe
21 but listen to the sufferings of our hearts
22 there are those who when they come to plead

23 say make us Black Englishmen decorated Afro-Saxons
24 Creole masters leading native races
25 but we wandering African urchins

26 who will return one day
27 say oh listen Africa
28 the tomtoms of the revolution
29 beat in our hearts at night
30 make us the seven hundred parts of your race

31 stretching from the east to the west
32 but united inside your womb
33 because I have dreamt in the shadows of Freetown
34 crashing under the yoke of its ferocious civilization!
[Page 17 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : ABSURDITY [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 All my people
2 would die if
3 you split open my belly!
4 You do not know how it feels

5 to be the rot of your country
6 even the vultures
7 will be afraid of your corpse
8 my mother you have given me

9 a perennial prison
10 and I carry the keys around
11 as I am my own murderer
12 and blessed be the death I will die
13 it will reveal my horizon to me
14 there is no labour
15 greater than my agony
16 or this sorrow destroying my soul
17 here is my soul in fuel and flames
18 crinkling in my hands
19 I offer it to you
20 take the carcasses away
21 but don't kill that flame
22 that lights my people's eyes
23 I am the beginning the running image

24 and the foul progency of my race
25 these strange Afro-Saxon negroes
26 and for deceiving the world
27 about our absurdity
28 behold my negralized head in flames!
[Page 18 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE MASOCHIST [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 don't ask me
2 why I look so sad
3 I did not know my father
4 only an apparition
5 who said he was a phoenix
6 my face is the apocalypse
7 of my misery
8 mind and body examined
9 I stand a paradigm of sorrow
10 Creole Creole
11 one is the raped mulattress
12 who wets the slave bed
13 after the planter is spent
14 the nigger who does not know

15 his own genes who knows
16 his Afro-Saxon name
17 who does not know his own cross
18 who grins at the crucifixion
19 of his own sex
20 yesterday I remember
21 I had performed the lavabo
22 the lavabo which cleansed the stain
23 the white Creole madness!
[Page 19 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : MY SOUL O OASIS! [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also
has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 Trying to curtain
2 myself in the night
3 there comes the news
4 to shatter my heart ---
5 my heart like my brothers
6 sick in the head!
7 They shot five soldiers dead last night

8 sorcerers of a counter-revolution
9 but to die in the inferno of Sierra Leone
10 does not equal my distress
11 which has the red flame of a violated soul
12 shadows of the conquistadors

13 I do not know, Pedro da Cinta
14 and the Argentine Pedro de Alvarado
15 and all the other djinns of Sierra Leone
16 which one of you plundered the tree of agony in my soul?
17 the guns echoed in Argentina
18 I loved dangerously without thinking of my years

19 my love is a poniard, see it tear at my heart
20 and give me a river crying of the spirits
21 so that upon its bank you will see me sad
22 singing of their gangrene
23 do they keep the fire and the sword

24 these men who dance passionately in the holocaust
25 if so will they bring back the soul
26 which fled from my life?
27 Borges in Buenos Aires writes me a poem

28 which is not the cure for his eyes
29 which is not the milk from my sweetheart's breasts
30 to mull the oasis of my distress
31 only the disembowelled belly of a youth
32 tells me the Sierra is in good health!
[Page 20 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : CONCERTO FOR AN EXILE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
Graveyard also has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 And the guns roared on

2 in Sierra Leone and Argentina
3 to plunder the tree of agony
4 in my soul!
5 The news of the coups the bullets in my soul!

6 I plunge into the streets holding the dead in my head
7 I deface my face with my leprous hands
8 I flee from a pack of hounds
9 tuned to the reverberations in my heart
10 what poem shall I write for my fratricidal brothers

11 whose lust has made the Sierra a volcano too bloody in my life
12 Brigadier Bangura General La Nusse my soul executioners
13 what revolutions shall I start for you
14 they who should join the revolution are dead decalcified body and soul
15 and I am stripped of my vanity my love my joy
16 my vanity for wishing to marry two continents in love
17 I know neither the days nor the nights of my days
18 the nights which cheat me standing headstrong upon my passion
19 away in Sierra Leone the boulevards of corpses

20 they shot them and slit their bellies for proof of their subversion
21 they were men of my salvation so they said who faced the eunuch Christ
22 lying upside down on that ravaged Sierra Leonean earth
23 and drunkenly talked about Che writing illogicalities for revolts
24 but in speaking of those revolutions a savage bird entered my soul
25 to sing me a concerto for pain my lady sang me a concerto of betrayal
26 that senorita's sex too sweet too vicious to my soul!
27 and I come to you once again Pedro da Cinta

28 my Portuguese conquistador my Sierra my volcano
29 was I a part of it the eruption tearing my country apart
30 I have my Nova Scotian madness my tree of agony
31 and let my brothers know I walk the streets of exile
32 clutching their bullets in my soul!
[Page 21 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : VOLCANO [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 First the innocent

2 next the guilty ones
3 next the makers of occult
4 then my brothers all demons
5 burnt in the fire-dance
6 beat out with gongs
7 on the conga-drum of my back!
8 And now this disquisition my Sierra!
9 was I a part of it
10 this gust of lava my pox
11 sordidly oozing into my skull
12 or Vesuvius madly phallic with rage
13 crippling the loins of men
14 somnolent and debauched
15 afterwards to sweeten their cannibal ecstasy

16 the lamias in their beds
17 voluptuous varanuses
18 insidiously slit open their aortas
19 thereby betraying their souls
20 O pedro O mountain
21 their disgusting apendages
22 thus seeing this pus at the mouth of a stream

23 brimming with their foam a stream like a prismatic bird
24 which at the long eclipse of the sun showed the world
25 that satyr teaming up with my voyagers
26 to rape the Sierra Leonean earth
27 I would drink the sap despoiling my blood
28 therefore I am raving and ranting

29 my rotten nose clogging up
30 my claws piercing my head
[Page 22 ]
31 I no longer have a country centrifugal and proud

32 to assuage my long, miserable perdition

33 also the love which bludgeoned me
34 afflicted my head like a brain haemorrhage
35 and now the whirlwind night

36 lashing my grief right and left
37 my head at the flash of a whip spins on its neck
38 obeying the wind in its red madness
39 awkwardly following the path
40 my Portuguese conqueror
41 to you my phantom of steel I say to you
42 brand me deeper to nourish my bleeding heart!
[Page 23 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : STORM [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth with
Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 Ah! the Sierra is a volcano
2 a gathering of clouds to announce

3 the coming storm the day lashes
4 at the trees its giddiness of rage
5 saluting the storm the storm prepares the day
6 I pass my hand over my brow

7 has it already the revolt of the times
8 the day grows mad and melancholy

9 the day turns blue with rancour
10 the day the seas flex their muscles
11 like giant anacondas
12 the day shows its fangs for the fools
13 to throw their heads there
14 alone a peasant sharpens his machete
15 to prepare himself for the storm
16 out of the corners of his drooping eyes
17 comes the octopus with its eight stiletto suckers
18 which must pass through the hearts of those
19 who live leisurely on the exchequer
20 they are heaving! see their gluttonous hearts

21 which neither blade nor storm has touched as yet
22 to reveal their rot that which they swallowed in haste
23 the bestiality of every regime

24 learnt from the bitter taste of the sun
25 languid with the ineptness of yesterday
26 but seen in the raging of the sea
27 they are failing to curtain the storm which prepares the day!
[Page 24 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : LOTUS-EATER [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 It is dawn mountain of madness I see your scorching hands!

2 see the day your corollary your sister seduce me
3 the jungle awake cataclysmal at heart
4 the panthers with eyes great charcoals of fire
5 and the mamba coiled waiting to strike
6 but tell me O mountain where are the hurricanes of the revolt
7 the revolution of the oppressed the revolt of the peasants
8 to make Africa less decrepit draining the blood of cowardice from veins
9 the murmurs in her belly what makes them so weak
10 gargantuan beast swallowing her black wretchedness!
11 when will it happen my Sierra

12 so that your torch may extirpate the sickness of agoraphobia
13 so that no ellipsoidal 'isms may bound your strength again that from
14 your belly may come the violent rays of a virginal sun so that my
15 thyroid gland may burst with the thundering of ten thousand tornadoes
16 that the voices of acacias the breaths of deserts the dams of rivers
17 the throats of savannahs the thighs of baobabs may cry REVOLT
18 on the slime bed of a beach a warthog pisses there

19 soothing the eyes soothing the souls of my voyagers
20 waterlily lovers waterlily excrescences
21 those to whom the sinking of ships the emptying of bowels
22 the crunching of the jaws of sharks are taken for joy
23 endlessly a storm rages on throws its hands around the necks of trees
24 bringing them down into the gulf of forewarning into the pits of oblivion
25 enjoying the storm a svelte mermaid combs her hair with a golden comb
[Page 25 ]
26 her voice is the sweet flavouring of orchard-maple leaves

27 at the pull of the wind her tail pirouettes like a nude belly dancer
28 her eyes are the mocking gems of a sorceress' fire
29 her breast is the slime of a patch of quicksand
30 yet this wild heaving of my heart woman oh sorceress
31 throw a javelin there so that it keeps still!
[Page 26 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : ENVIRONNE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 Head set round perfect

2 back humped heart and
3 claws mixed wickedly
4 in my perdition as I follow
5 The Road to Jamaica!
6 Losing my tracks one more time

7 I planted my feet deep in my heart
8 I followed the laxative shadows
9 emptying the bowels close to the river
10 which I must cross to get to my foul ancestors
11 a moonchild all demon danced before me
12 his body covered with thorn-warts
13 eye set centre on his face
14 laugh mirrors a grizzly bear
15 is he the preface to our holocaust
16 or these megrim attacks I nurse in my head
17 or perhaps my split memory of a woman
18 who offers her breast nude to the blade of wind
19 expecting a talisman for her teeth
20 likewise these shadows before me
21 all noxious all pestiferous in their blood of veratrum
22 which are sperms of death watering our deserts of madness
23 it would be nice to swallow their death-pox
24 should you refuse my pus of death

25 which I drop leisurely on this promenade
26 but for these vertebral forms lurking threateningly in the night
27 so colour your teeth with this sapodilla earth
28 to protect your ephemeral souls
29 this country is skeleton enough
30 without your wishing to die in it
31 bank to bank the river as they die
32 in the nights of the fire-dance
33 beat out with gongs on the conga-drum of my back!
[Page 27 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : PEASANTS [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 'The Masters of the Dew'
Jacques Roumain
2 The agony: I say their agony!
3 the agony of imagining their squalor but never knowing it

4 the agony of cramping them in roach infected shacks
5 the agony of treating them like chattel slaves
6 the agony of feeding them abstract theories they do not understand
7 the agony of their lugubrious eyes and bartered souls
8 the agony of giving them party cards but never party support
9 the agony of marshalling them on election day but never on banquet nights
10 the agony of giving them melliferous words but mildewed bread
11 the agony of their cooking hearths dampened with unuse
12 the agony of their naked feet on the hot burning tarmac
13 the agony of their children with projectile bellies
14 the agony of long miserable nights
15 the agony of their thatched houses with too many holes
16 the agony of erecting hotels but being barred from them
17 the agony of watching the cavalcade of limousines
18 the agony of grand state balls for God knows who
19 the agony of those who study meaningless 'isms in incomprehensible languages
20 the agony of intolerable fees for schools but with no jobs in sight
21 the agony of it all I say the agony of it all
22 but above all the damn agony of appealing to their patience
23 Africa beware! their patience is running out!
[Page 28 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : I THROW MYSELF TO THE CROCODILES [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 It is finished!
2 this sweet wagging of tongues

3 the strange bedfellows
4 Africa puts in my bed
5 the price of this deal dissects my groins
6 count your dirty rands my brothers

7 count them with your hands
8 sanguinary for gold
9 my brothers of dismemberment
10 detonating the dynamites in my soul
11 of late thinking about Africa

12 I have felt the pachyderms
13 charging at my heart:
14 I delight in their stampede!
15 I understand I understand
16 the rationality of it all
17 the A-B-C of the communist threat
18 this need to unite devil and saint under the banner of Christ
19 tell me what hyperdulia I'll make for Mary my virgin of saints
20 Christ will surely pay for it

21 this strange obedience to his will
22 those who consent to be hewers of woods
23 his black drawers of water brothers of my disembowelment
24 to be paid in strokes his bloody salvation
25 the riviera they are building

26 with goldfish in the lagoons
27 I shall be clown for the tourists
[Page 29 ]
28 I'll throw myself to the crocodiles

29 their jaws will be less treacherous to me
30 gentler than the words of my brothers
31 who sell the peasants for the black gold of their wives
32 if they make a bed of thorns my joy

33 ah what burning grass they will swallow in death!
[Page 30 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : MISERY OF THE CONVERT [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
1 A protestant
2 I swore I would be chaste
3 to worship Mary the virgin of saints
4 my sex is a sterile seed in the wind
5 it has the sickness of my soul
6 Christ I have your vanity in my head
7 century to century summer to summer
8 ocean to ocean continent to continent
9 I carry the blessings of your rape
10 I was a king before they nailed you on the cross
11 converted I read ten lies in your silly commandments
12 to honour you my Christ
13 when you have deprived me of my race
14 I remember one night

15 dreaming in a missionary house
16 I had driven the shadows out
17 spitting at their tomtom Gods
18 I was sane
19 only when King George died
20 Sunday was a present for me
21 grandmother drooling in her room
22 beneath the shadow of King George
23 did not begrudge the treats
24 ---one pair of shoes
25 ---one pair of socks
26 ---one pair of shorts
27 all in the name of the lord

28 I did not know to be a Creole and a saint
29 meant to have sung the ballad of your grief
30 when the saviour himself did not rejoice
[Page 31 ]
31 Christ you must have been a peasant in your time

32 you died naked on your cross
33 it was the church that made you a landowner
34 and built you a catholic empire
35 tell me how many slaves you had
36 I have the asientos memorized in my head
37 how many burnt offerings do I owe
38 you my colour blind Christ
39 America eighty per cent white
40 sixty per cent black in your gas chambers
41 don't play on my susceptibility to pray

42 I have had enough of your forgiveness
43 I have not fared well against the army of your saints
44 give me time
45 four centuries are a long time to be drunk
46 with your passion my Christ
47 asking will somebody tell me my people's name
48 but do you know my people's name

49 or where in this ocean they died
50 thrown off the slavers' ships
51 my people for whom I searched in vain
52 the moon led me I followed the sea

53 weed to weed my perdition beside me
54 no Portuguese flesh greeted me
55 not even a drop of sperm for my hair
56 yet I offered all my negritude
57 the water-soldiers played rattlesnakes round my legs
58 and I offered my soul offered all my negritude
59 to the sea waves the arms of a woman
60 the amazon to whom I offered my negritude
61 that senorita who tortured my heart
62 during my raw, pernicious winters in America
[Page 32 ]
63 I entered the sea

64 searched for the manifests of the trade
65 the waterdogs threatened my search
66 but ten souls came to me
67 each one stained with a different shit
68 God knows how many ships sailed this sea
69 emptying the slavers' shit
70 my own soul stained with the purest shit
71 I know it I was the first they branded in your name
72 Christ you definitely must have been a peasant in your time

73 I have drunk a cupful of your blood
74 cheaper than the blood of goats
75 costlier than the heads of my people
76 bodies without souls who hurl themselves
77 at the flames of your cross
78 the image of my perdition
79 you have driven me mad

80 you have cast me in war against the army of your saints
81 a pagan now angered by the passion in your soul
82 I have deserted that soul
83 your torn borrowed soul
84 mine will await me fresh growth
85 on this lonely road which I walk
86 with my Creole head ablaze!
[Page 33 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : OBELISK [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 I have given up
2 trying to be a christian
3 in this nation of faggots
4 this country with its religious negroes
5 ugly in mourning for a eunuch Christ
6 O St Phillip if you only knew me
7 as a worthy disciple
8 you would have laughed at my insanity
9 I was myself the light in the dark

10 I branded Jesus on the chests of millions
11 but Christ you lied to me at Calvary
12 you did not die to save the world
13 but to make it a plantation where my people sweat
14 yet I was faithful I refused to become a communist

15 but the polluted rivers of my country have flooded
16 carrying away all my levitation
17 since then my despair
18 has grown taller than the obelisk of your cross
19 and I embrace no one Christ
20 here are my lamed penis

21 and my synclastic head of blood
22 they will stand for my credentials
23 although they torment me
24 I rejoice
25 for the idiosyncrasies of my brothers
26 I give my hands to your flames
27 I die to be posthumously rewarded
28 with an English grave with elephants dancing there!
[Page 34 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : SONG OF A ROCK [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 I am a rock
2 I am a mountain
3 I laugh with those
4 who laugh too loud
5 down in Freetown
6 they live haphazardly
7 discounting a holocaust
8 the vampires of sweet blood
9 I am a rock
10 I am a mountain
11 drinking with those
12 who drink too much
13 these meteors in my eyes

14 if they burn too fast
15 imagine the funeral train
16 of our final laughter!
[Page 35 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : LIFE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth with
1 My body is aflame
2 I deliver my heart to the fire
3 the world which loves a sacrifice
4 eats my belly bit by bit these blazing entrails
5 a death in the afternoon

6 grown from the cancer in my soul
7 for the soul which tortures the flesh ...
8 what head has a monopoly of slugs
9 more than my head
10 my body writhes in its pain

11 the djinns dance above me
12 the hemlock makes my soul soft
13 for the gall from a love-maiden's lips
14 see my traitors flock around me
15 to deliver me whom they inflamed
16 my body rots in the sun

17 my body poisons the flowers
18 ah the flowers die breathing my soul
19 I abandon my soul to the fire!
[Page 36 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : SHADOW [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 The day
2 pregnant with the sun
3 the night pregnant with the moon
4 have the shadows behind
5 my mother
6 was pregnant with my race
7 she carried a black seed
8 which blossomed
9 without the shadow of the race
10 my race a stream
11 listen a river without a source
12 it goes on this journey
13 that has no beginning
14 the end may be the beginning
15 a bleached man has nothing to lose

16 but the curse of his alientation!
[Page 37 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : AGONY OF THE DARK CHILD [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
1 I came to my mother
2 seeking the warmth of her breasts
3 she was frightened
4 you see I was dark

5 too dark my grandmother lamented
6 from the pharmacy

7 medicated bars of soap
8 drops of oil, drippings of water
9 and ornamented cures
10 for the naked body
11 she was frightened she told me

12 I was too dark!
[Page 38 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : MYOPIA [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 On rainy mornings
2 you will see them drenched
3 PEASANTS! shivering in their emaciated bones
4 along the boulevards of misery
5 the boulevards of this country

6 are railway tracks in my heart
7 a train of anguish runs on them
8 rage corollary of hunger
9 the ricepads of this country
10 are putrid marshlands in my soul
11 tended by no magic fertilizers
12 mountain if the wind blows tomorrow

13 make me a sabre of that wind
14 if the skeletons of stillborn promises
15 dry up in the catacombs
16 make me the incendiary bomb
17 if madness we must have
18 let me be the hangman hanging myself
19 hanging them hanging the day
20 not by its neck not by its belly
21 but by its heart seen in its great betrayal!
[Page 39 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : SOLITUDE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 I am standing by a lake
2 watching the algae fondle with the swans
3 this purple heart within me I open my mouth
4 to sing the night the sad threnody of my life
5 my shadow my lake have you the solace I seek for the night
6 amidst the lake ten boats anchored lazily

7 bringing back my grief the memory of two hundred years
8 the passage bellowing inside me forcing my tears
9 oh Granville Sharp have you come to plague this bleeding heart again
10 my love my traitor
11 my callous aphrodite
12 I am no longer your Pushkin
13 I die no more for you
14 no sword in my hand
15 no duel in my heart
16 to guide me to my death coward between my legs
17 I save my tears for the swans

18 the night delivers me to my death
19 straight to the bar head in my rum
20 to drink my sorrows to the brink.
[Page 40 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE CANCER [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 Undoubtedly
2 there was a mistake at my birth
3 linking the constellations with the crab
4 but giving me no shell to protect myself
5 thus this clot of pus in my soul
6 don't ask me if I have loved

7 these pine-needles in my eyes
8 whose pain now reveals
9 a misogynous life
10 are the discerning flames
11 of my gangrenous heart
12 the superficiality of so many hearts

13 if they bring you love who is stupid enough
14 to kiss their hyena cheeks
15 then this world sickens me

16 with its fevent christianity
17 never a direct hearse
18 to the charnel-house
19 they are mad

20 to prepare a funeral for me
21 they will be guilty of blasphemy
22 invoking the name of their god
23 to deliver my pagan soul
24 after my death
25 I ask but one request
26 and only one
27 throw my body to the sharks!
[Page 41 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : NODAL [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth with
1 It is night
2 I suffer from fidelity
3 I lie awake in retrospect of last winter's groanings
4 my heart plays a game of darts
5 I cuddle my pillow in my heart
6 my tears betray my ingrained weakness
7 thus I suffer from fidelity
8 a falcon flays my memory with its wings

9 its wings are the eyelashes of this virginal moon
10 whose solar sperm makes a pond in my snout!
11 the wildebeests thrusting their horns into the grass of my heart
12 on the moon at night when its belly is red

13 let the serpent of fire devour my heart
14 O nightmare my guardian angel
15 I have sewn my love fetishes on my brow
16 the thread of wire knits a beautiful yoke there
17 and let the great bandanna of hell kindle itself in my eyes
18 and to this head which is the planed sissoo of a deceitful love

19 make upon it tattoos of a love farewell
20 and with the solen make at my cheeks scarifications
21 of an alphabetical love O hurricane lover!
22 I have swallowed my roses red blue and hot dead in my soul
23 I have enjoyed my sunburnt kisses perched on my serrated lips
24 I have sweetened my rum with nitro-chloric acid heh heh heh
25 and for my solace let a pargurian dig into my skull!
[Page 42 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : I DIE BEFORE THIRTY [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard
also has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 A skullful of rum!
2 a park my birthday no kisses no cake

3 no candles no flowers the night goes on
4 already I am old
5 without grey hair on my head
6 without mama or papa dead
7 without scion in my stream
8 no tomb earmarked for my rot
9 my beleaguered heart requiring a transplant

10 a dead man in my steps his shadow my own said
11 that which you seek is here
12 a paradise of peace
13 where neither pain nor love may cheat the soul in you
14 where the waters of purgatory may cleanse the poison in your heart
15 where the verisimilitudes of a few unknowns may open their paths to you
16 but behold the eunuch Christ!

17 resurrected by his own cunning
18 his uncrucified body and hands
19 falsifying his death his murderous disciples
20 St Phillip their leader my abandoned saint
21 dressed in cloaks of blood in cloaks of red
22 multiplied in number by all the other parasites of my flesh
23 burning my soul with the candles of damnation
24 my heart quivering smelling their enchanting feast
25 sweetly seducing me into the system of Dante's hell!
[Page 43 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : HOROSCOPE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 The crab like the oasis

2 in my soul milky as the
3 moon which shelters the night
4 the crab sore as the scabs
5 on its back brilliant
6 as the night ...
7 O Soul O Soul!
8 Why should I be living in the past

9 mesmerized by a love which nurtures
10 the incorrigible romantic in me
11 this breath of tomorrow fanning my ruptured soul
12 does little to release me from my pain
13 I do not sing for Rabearivelo imprisoned in himself

14 I do not sing for Baudelaire pathetic and debauched
15 nor for Tchicaya limping on his crutch
16 or for Rimbaud precocious and wild
17 no I do not sing for Verlaine head soaked in absinthe
18 I sing only for myself truly the paradigm of sorrow

19 all my sickness of head whirling at the whim of a wind
20 Creole ugliness of blue exrescences flushing at the
21 deaths of Sierra Leoneans all brothers of my misery
22 now moaning under my cross

23 I want my own calvary blazing in the sun

24 not the blue tranquillity of the clouds
25 or women with hyena cheeks wailing like hens
26 or men tearing at their hearts
27 no no no that won't do
28 let there be demons dancing at my death
29 I want my body pelted with stones
30 I want my nails ten inches long soaked in wasp poison
31 and for my eulogy let a faun sing me the song of a goat
32 but above all let there be dancing to relish my death!
[Page 44 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : IMPRISONMENT [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 And they flattened me

2 the violent storms in my belly
3 giant arms of riotous day
4 hot storms destructive
5 the sea their sister sings of its sorrow
6 made worse by my people
7 trapped between the sea-urchins
8 where the mermaids slug them
9 in the essence of their pain
10 what are they doing there

11 that they call me to their midst
12 I feel in my head the jolts of two thousand cyclones

13 let their force be my delirium
14 a shadow a memory the hands of a woman

15 I mean a woman pillorying my head
16 by loving that woman
17 nightmare sister of hurricanes
18 I am bleeding in this ghetto of agony!
19 ah! loving in the name of Christ

20 is that possible when he himself was a Judas
21 and those who betrayed me his vicious accomplices?
22 my sadness, my tears, my bitter taste of love!

23 where is the god of my refuge and strength
24 to thrown my body at him
25 I am no longer capable of love
26 I keep no more the faked commandments of Christ
27 I stand on the threshold of death
28 this death that follows love
29 offering my heart rotten as the garbage dump!
[Page 45 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : GUINEA [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth with
1 They have invaded Guinea

2 the Portuguese murderers
3 and their negro renegades
4 fascist enemies of the revolution
5 hurriedly dispatched by the NATO clique
6 exonerated by their papal asientos
7 they had hoped to enslave the peasants of Guinea

8 as they did four centuries ago
9 but oh the invincible armies of Alpha Yaya
10 down the mountains of Foutah Djallon
11 and my heart lights up
12 like a burning flame in the night
13 Bissau Bissau Bissau

14 I am of your image
15 in spite of my Creole absurdity
16 and six hundred Fulani negroes
17 behind the guilt of my country
18 I am not the renegade

19 who has forsaken your shores
20 I am not the vampire
21 gnawing at your heart
22 to feed capitalist banks
23 I am your poet
24 writing No to the world!
[Page 46 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : LICENTIOUS [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 Tell me O desert
2 do you know
3 my people's paths?
4 Stinking of a profligate's lust

5 I entered all the whorehouses in my path
6 entered all the brothels and harems
7 the moon shone in a nudist colony
8 as I slept with stately women
9 voluptuous and blasé
10 you should have seen me then
11 caricature of the chimera's king
12 I imagined myself king of satyrs
13 Adam betrayed by Eve
14 eating of the forbidden fruit
15 a bouquet of nosegays served as my bed
16 the twilight burned in my eyes
17 the ophiolater in his wild ecstasy
18 I am no cyclone O desert O oases

19 but what tree lacks my voodoo madness
20 sluggish movements of a demented beast

21 a man passes by a fire in his heart
22 where the hurricane uproots the trees
23 in its first madness which tells him
24 the desert's sand is soft
25 no match against the torrid storms of his quest
26 the oases groan in his heart
27 and to set the desert ablaze
28 the shrubs have let themselves be burnt
[Page 47 ]
29 the shrubs madden the desert

30 a man dances there driven by demons!
31 the trees burn themselves in his heart
32 the trees break their branches in his heart
33 then putting sand in his eyes
34 the desert shows the man the route of his madness

35 taken by two thousand mules laden with salt
36 not one trader to buy him now
37 not even one dinar of gold for his head
38 neither his mummy nor his form in all this quest
39 the desert is emptied of all caravans now
40 and where are the footprints of his brothers
41 in this desert dance
42 between the sand the desert mauls a man in his steps

43 the hurricane was his madness!
[Page 48 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : SLUGGISH [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 I walk on the streets of New York

2 and gaze at the moon in her sleep
3 in this my long exile my wandering exile
4 my feet have their prints in the sun
5 I do not remember my own name
6 as I wander on these treacherous paths
7 O moon you my constant companion
8 on these perilous streets
9 hour after hour we have kept the constant vigil
10 but tell me who will open my people's eyes
11 the crucified Jew
12 Christ I have not known
13 the altar of your prayers
14 these four years
15 my madness has blessed my Creole head
16 I have never known how to honour my father's name
17 because I am a voodoo child
18 so I wander on the alien roads
19 night O night you my better half
20 make me not a victim of these vagabond feet
21 so that my worthless blood
22 may not be shed on the hard soil of America!
[Page 49 ]
The Graveyard Also Has Teeth
PART I POEMS IN CONVERSATION WITH SIERRA LEONE
23 Don't forget it, poet.

24 In whatever place or epoch
25 you make
26 or suffer History,
27 there'll always be,
28 lurking in ambush
29 the dangerous poem.
HERBERTO PADILLA (Cuban poet)
[Page 51 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : ON BEING A POET IN SIERRA LEONE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-:
The Graveyard also has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 A poet alone in my country

2 I am seeking the verisimilitudes in life
3 the fire of metaphors the venom of verse
4 my country you are my heart living like a devastated landscape
5 always the magic of being underground of burying truth
6 of shedding your metaphysical form
7 country I wish to die being your poet
8 I who have so condemned and sold you
9 I who have so loved and hated you
10 imagine my sadness, the poetry of being you
11 a colossus strangled by fratricidal parasites
12 have I betrayed you writing my hermetic poetry
13 I suffer the estrangement of being too 'intellectual'
14 at the university the professors talk about the poetry
15 of Syl Cheney-Coker condemning students
16 to read me in the English honours class
17 my country I do not want that!
18 do not want to be cloistered in books alone
19 I want to be the albatross learning and living your fits
20 I want only to plough your fields
21 to be the breakfast of the peasants who read
22 to help the fishermen bring in their catch

23 I want to be your national symbol of life
24 because my heart is heavy country and exile calls
25 beating the pangs of oblivion on my brow
26 I want once more like the common man
27 to love a woman without dying of love
28 to leave a son or daughter to remember my grave
29 country you my pain, my phoenix, my disastrous gloating python
30 in whose belly all my anger dies
31 I am going to be happy to stop carrying my pain
32 like a grenade in my heart, I want to be simple
33 if possible to live with you, and then one day die leaving
34 my poetry, an imperfect metaphor of life!
[Page 52 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : SONG FOR THE RAVAGED COUNTRY [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-:
1 Like an epilogue for the cadavers stretched alongside the truth

2 my song of anguish not learned from the blue nightingale
3 or these skeletons of plesiosaurian gods lingering in their eyes
4 like remoras sucking the foetus of their reactionary words
5 like caiman brilliant as poinsettia
6 like the belly revolting against the hunger fathering my cowardice
7 like a lance hurled from the obelisk of my rage
8 like pangolin gnawing at their bellies fattened with treachery
9 like aloes served with paprika producing the hiccups
10 like an aria cut from bamboo whirling in the oasis of my blood
11 like the cry of tornado at dawn echoing the jackals in heat
12 like my rage phallic with storm no oriflamme to drape
13 the violent pyres of my eyes that and the maddening currents
14 in my deep brow
15 like the lightning thunder of hooves which echoes the burst
16 in the ventricles the pulsating tusk of the narwhal
17 inside the drowned man's throat
18 my song floats reaching you my country skewered like goat
19 my song aria of serpent will float to your horns
20 not losing its fertile blood that it may grow like octopus
21 caressing the lines of their necks heaving forth their fall
22 the rain to drink to water these fields of our dreams
23 when I alone shall stand in the park sinking my poetry
24 between their teeth!
[Page 53 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : TALONS IN THE FLESH OF MY COUNTRY [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1 But it does not matter that I live

2 in this country angry and sad
3 it does not matter that my words
4 reach only the 'privileged' ones
5 my words acid like the wounds bled
6 out of the times; the beasts' terror
7 momentarily plunders the human resilience
8 not guarded in their lair the beasts
9 slobbering these drought-infected waifs
10 I know, now that it does not matter
11 that my mouth trembles with my verse
12 seeing their treachery walking
13 arm-in-arm with justice the life howling
14 like a brochure of stamps and leones
15 the monolithic arrogance of power
16 they stuff themselves with for now!
17 the nights are no longer safe

18 a mother cries inside a corridor
19 lit only by the moon's reflection
20 on that woman's torn taffeta
21 a hurricane passes inside her throat
22 outside her child with no eyes
23 but with a madman's laughter
24 dances to the hurricane
25 dreamer preparing the necromancy
26 the stinking cadavers wait for their mothers
27 but listen that woman has blood in her eyes without being drunk
28 that woman has lice in her blood without being sick
29 that woman has grey hair without being old
30 and naming her mother a shattered tomato
31 seeding the putrid vegetation
32 a thousand orphans without eyes
33 walk in this country mined with injustice
[Page 54 ]
34 Lord the farce Lord the comedy!

35 robed in black and the sacred law books
36 the lizards lick over the buttered edges
37 swallowing the deadly contagion
38 and spit into the rivers the bile

39 where others little suspecting the lizards
40 drink of the precious waters
41 and I write about these beasts I write
42 these simple lines about these waters
43 I swim in the toxin in the waters
44 swallowing the tadpoles hatched in there
45 what have I not known in my land
46 the men of our dreams the men of our delusions
47 and Sierra Leone like a gargantuan beast
48 producing the slobber whose former image
49 I no longer remember because the cut-throats' wives'
50 teeth seen in the vulgar reflection of the sun
51 ape the talons tearing at the flesh of my country!
[Page 55 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE EXECUTED 1 [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
For Ibrahim Taqi and others
1 So that rebels and peasants when they are united

2 in my country no longer oppose me when I attack
3 the butchers in the thick of that revolt
4 giving me the sweat of the savannahs
5 at the eclipse of centrifugal blood
6 I drank from the dead displayed outside the prisons,
7 my priest is singing a song, not for these dead
8 my courageous dead, but for the living dead
9 and out of our regret the shrunken necks
10 bearing the marks of the dictator's hands
11 the crimes cooked in sorcery by their own priest
12 in the ubiquitous rape of the country
13 desires I understand so well, that they relish

14 better than their foul births
15 through which they arrived one morning
16 their souls in the service of mephistopheles
17 to prepare the coming of the gangrene
18 arming the gnats in the solar plexus of my people
19 at the beginning of their slow death
20 seeing clearly the canines of these desires

21 these oriflammes of their priest
22 will lure the innocents into their throats
23 for the feast of scurrilous fools
24 before the vertiginous collapse
25 of the lotus-eaters!
26 they spread their bodies in the street

27 like dogs killed to pacify an implacable God
28 but to arm oneself with dead bodies
29 does not make the living crustaceans in the heart
30 thus they are sharpening their weapons, their cry of despair
[Page 56 ]
31 to rise with the terrestrial suns

32 one day at the door of each widow
33 mourning the skeletons of her son
34 that day when their priest no longer destroys my soul

35 when I shall face them, my priest combating their priest
36 all my poetry will make my body slippery in their arms
37 living to tell the world how they have eaten the innocent
38 these cannibals in the absence of meats.
[Page 57 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE SEA [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 Rise blood, phallus of malarial sea!

2 rise the coefficients of the storm
3 I chart my course on that savage storm
4 I am the coelacanth coming back the exhumation
5 of my bones when night rose with the gloating eloquence
6 of pythons!
7 and now denying all memory, the great putrefaction in Sierra Leone
8 I make my unctuous delirium I exit between the corals bearing
9 the shadow gambler in the equinoctial volcano of the sea!
10 I make a storm the just harvest of your designs

11 the fer-de-lance in the majesty of its eight feet
12 and the venomous onslaught of its love; thus the swell

13 of my muscle, the varicose of the woman mid-hour in the deliverance
14 of the storm; my pulse revolts against the ramparts of your fear
15 my obdurateness heightens this is the night
16 from what drunken fit do I greet you my Sierra Leone
17 woman torn from the flesh of my waters
18 I am Vesuvius the sixteenth I am Mauna Kea

19 my name is Mauna Loa behold the steaming calderas
20 of my lips! not a vessel in the calm of your eyes
21 has not known the heat oozed from the circular currents
22 of my body
23 and the blood squeezed from the sea-anemones
24 the crawling benthos multiplied in the icy pyramids
25 of my body leaps festooning you with the vertigos
26 of the tidal waves the murderous coefficients of my great depths!
[Page 58 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : HURRICANE AT NIGHT [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard
1 I listen to the sea's lachrymose voice

2 echoes of the terrible dereliction
3 they give to my country
4 the men of Apollyon spreading the carnage
5 like the bandanna of victory for Christ
6 who knows all, the barbarian cosmology
7 of their politics read at the dance of djinns
8 amidst the rumours in the diabolical silence of the harmattan
9 monologues not stretching taut the throat

10 though my dead brother wears the crustaceous mask
11 of the sea's breath will make your revolt
12 the play of griffins in the succulent depths of their eyes
13 and the sea-horses parading like phalanges of despair

14 in the broad marrow of their phosphorescent face
15 prepare the volition of your tropical prick
16 when the sperm of your fiery protuberance
17 will make a hoe to toil the vegetable chest of my elan!
[Page 59 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : NAUSEA [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth with
1 Waking up this morning I live

2 just so that I can write on the pavement
3 with the blood of my country
4 just so that my heart will stretch
5 across this vast savannah to feel the other man's pain
6 on the hacienda in South America
7 I do not know his name Senor
8 but that Indian there brother of grief
9 and his mother who chews a thousand pieces of cocaine
10 to fill her stomach's void
11 I saw them once give a votive hand
12 to the peasants of this country
13 platitudinous and harsh
14 night and the city spreads its talons of fear!

15 I hear in the shanty a singing mulattress nursing her son
16 in whose eyes she reads the hungry patterns of death
17 wrought by those who have never sorrowed
18 by those who have never known pain
19 by those who have never died once
20 to die for their disgrace
21 I make them out slitting my throat
22 I smell them nights disguised as saints
23 ventricose for the mothers of gold
24 who offer their daughters
25 to be fucked on the surf of the sea
26 they tell me they are mercenaries here

27 not a sister with cinnamon breasts
28 I remember them lachrymose heart
29 ventriloquists in the souls ...!
[Page 60 ]
30 they had not killed my brothers yet

31 they had not flattened my mother yet
32 nor given me this crop of thorns growing in my heart
33 daughters of the word on the flesh of the alphabet

34 minions of the politicians in the opulence of their necks!
35 the corruption in this country which nauseates me
36 to spit out my disgust and then die alive
37 remembering all these who denies me my death

38 laughing between the claws of vinegarroons
39 oh my land! my Sierra! my woman!

40 you have not killed me yet
41 for writing about your disease!
[Page 61 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : WHEN THE REVOLUTION IS NEAR AT HAND [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1 We come like a procession of dwarfs

2 to watch the bloody pterodactyl preying on the land
3 then fly askance like a dream that mirrors our lives
4 ruled by the butchers with a ventriloquist air
5 who come to us in the regiment of the Pope.
6 A ship is moribund piece by piece as it disintegrates
7 with no one to gather the flotsam for tomorrow
8 what talons do they so firmly put in the flesh of my people
9 that they make of my country a ghetto of silence?
10 without clearing my words in their official halls

11 I write the brushfire which spreads charges of my revolt
12 and dodge at night the bloodhounds they put in my tracks
13 salubrious politicians keeping guard over the heart of my country
14 these mad panjandrums in control of stalwart thugs
15 brandishing guns at the ears of my people
16 immobilizing themselves until they swallow the brushfire
17 but never understanding me, never understanding me
18 thus do I deceive them listening with my mortal soul

19 until these bombs in my heart detonate themselves
20 echoing the ghosts of the generation demanding at the eclipse
21 why they sacrificed the bones in that graveyard which has teeth
22 spraying their mummies with blood
23 without their knowing my volatile madness
24 but when this stream in my head dries up

25 stretching taut like a huge boa gliding over the maternal blade
26 a head not scornful but implacable nonetheless
27 which tossed the first man over the cliff
28 enveloping him in flames
29 let this be my testimony to my death
30 that here in this ghetto of silence there are many
31 who tergiversate for the blood of black flesh
32 and like a volcano I spit out my disgust
33 looking down at Sierra Leone!
[Page 62 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THESE WORDS OF OUR INFINITE SADNESS [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1 I own up to you now, my fear of life

2 indescribable terror scathing my heights
3 my eyes no longer lead me my name no longer names me
4 for today a dirty notch hangs from my throat
5 journeying through the channels of the soul
6 where no one has heard me demanding of my country
7 why I starve so much especially today
8 crackling my knuckles to free my blood body lice
9 understanding broadly that I exist for you man of the Ilama
10 burdened with what destiny lining the walls of your eyes
11 sweet talk they make of it, this hour of their political power
12 presaging their absence when I enter between their fingers
13 gravely registering my poetic DDT
14 barbaric and stupid then, I dress these politicians
15 tremendous their monolithic splendour
16 but for you who ape my conscience daily sweating
17 suffering from life soul of my soul
18 remembering as you suffer the pangs producing
19 these words I write for you now and for always
20 know that when I sing you I close you in perennial sadness
21 that you and I understand
22 that my blood is filthy, dirty faeces of the lizard

23 that they offer one dinar for my lewd Sierra Leonean head
24 my lips no longer feel the thunder of our land
25 but why the hurricane why the furnace

26 lighting the dry corners of our hearts
27 of course it is all right that you put your wrong foot

28 forward when you are sad that your infinite balance
29 sheet registers nil on your agricultural coin machine
30 that you give to their riches more than you take
[Page 63 ]
31 from their gold. In short, valetudinarian they invalid

32 you playing jigsaw puzzle with your life
33 however, brother, when death becomes our very selves

34 when the sons depart from their mothers---pain!
35 and they bring out the rum bottles grandfathers
36 of our squalor like the god of my soul
37 who has delivered me to St Phillip scimitar and saracens
38 where my mother did not promise me life
39 you will say I was the half brother of the black-jew
40 my soul is open to the sun.
[Page 64 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : BEGGARS [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 And taking account of your malice

2 your malice to hate without being haters
3 owing that you starve from head enlarging your sores
4 by decrees signed with the ink of your pain
5 and for the convenience of the Lebanese
6 they turn their water-hoses on you
7 a monopoly of diseases announce the trademark
8 of your life thanks to the lack of drugs
9 and the proliferation of ministers and mistresses
10 squandering half of the national budget
11 they build hotels and chalets in Las Palmas
12 without bothering to learn the language
13 not to mention the diplomatic bags
14 whisk through the customs like contagious cannibals
15 but you limping shadows under the crockets of the palace
16 starved in your saliva in your thorax
17 stretched like shadows lost in the desert's maw

18 coriaceous from wandering in Oedipian rage
19 how free you are the albatross in mid-flight
20 recording their collapse while your blood
21 inflames the burning charcoals of their hearts!
[Page 65 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : SOUL, CHILBLAINS AND SCAPULAS [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-:
1 I assume a desperate posture this morning

2 fluteman of the chamois hiding behind tombs
3 like that I hear voices thin as muslin
4 bones clumsy as oxen smelling of bacteria
5 smelling of woodworms and the lingering odour of asafetida
6 ---not a bit sourer than the phlegm from my flaming nose!---
7 when my flagellated cells dry up

8 I smoke my pipe and rise
9 labouring above my pestilential years
10 that way I exercise myself panting and coughing
11 from the bloodclots in my head
12 that smother when the harmattan strikes me joyfully in the heart
13 in coughing I weep my savannah life and cherish at night
14 the scarlet capsules of my mosquito body!
15 partly I practise the art of poetry

16 because all my country's misery rises up from my belly
17 like chilblains nourishing on children and it is here
18 that my poetry assumes its murderous intensity
19 because while remaining quiet I have observed the politicians
20 parcelling out pieces of my country
21 skinned from the scapulas of my country's peasants
22 my country's fleshy ribs
23 that broke between their rapacious hold
24 convulsively when I protest my coyote voice

25 fills the night from my epileptic being
26 and racing through the cemetery
27 the dead plunder me
28 but it is for you that I grieve so much
29 country of my soul!
[Page 66 ]
30 historically I revolt because the chronicles

31 say 1462 they discovered my country
32 without learning from the gibbons the name of my people
33 and tell me what woman will remake my country
34 sweating from the labour of my loins
35 I was the beginning of my country

36 the filth of my country the greediness of my country
37 and behold the blood which flows from my head
38 I the admiture of slavery and agony!
[Page 67 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : POET AMONG THOSE WHO ARE ALSO POETS [from Cheney-Coker,
Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 I drive round the dirty streets of Freetown

2 and observe a man standing at the corner of the library
3 stabbing his heart with a knife
4 another spits into the fountain his cola-nut checked hunger
5 another is crouching half dying under a giant cotton tree
6 shrieking another with a stream of saliva showering his face
7 hangs on to the gold-plated gates of the presidential palace
8 and further down a beggar goes by shouting he has been robbed
9 all in one hour all in one hour
10 one woman is screaming raped by a bureaucrat

11 a childless harlot is beaten by another with kids
12 at the cemetery three women examine their lost treasures in
13 bones
14 three sons like father son and holy ghost
15 down at the shanty they have turned off the water
16 because the women have ruined the toilets
17 and finally a woman has come confessed to selling her daughter
18 one child whips the other because she called him a dirty name
19 another is driven to school in a limousine unmarked

20 while the classmates walk on all ten
21 at the hospital the wards are in commotion because two children
22 have been bitten by dogs over at the garbage dump
23 such is the life seen driving round Freetown.
[Page 68 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : LETTER TO A TORMENTED PLAYWRIGHT [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,

For Yulisa Amadu Maddy
1 Amadu I live alone inside four walls of books

2 some I have read others will grow cobwebs
3 or maybe like some old friends and lovers
4 will fade away with their undiscovered logic
5 the world that I have seen: New York

6 where I suffered the suicidal brother
7 and London where I discovered Hinostroza
8 Delgado, Ortega, Heraud and the other
9 Andean poets with a rage very much like ours!
10 remember Amadu how terrible I said it was

11 that you were in exile and working
12 in the Telephone Office in touch with all
13 the languages of the world but with no world
14 to call your own; how sad you looked that winter
15 drinking your life and reading poetry with me
16 in the damp chilly English coffee shops
17 remember I said how furious I was

18 that Vallejo had starved to death in Paris
19 that Rabearivelo had killed himself
20 suffocated by an imaginary France
21 and I introduced Neruda and Guillen to you
22 and how in desperation we sought solace in the house
23 of John La Rose, that courageous Trinidadian poet
24 Amadu I am writing to you from the dungeon of my heart

25 the night brings me my grief and I am passive

26 waiting for someone to come, a woman
27 a friend, someone to soothe my dying heart!
[Page 69 ]
28 now the memory of our lives brings a knife to my poems

29 our deaths which so burdened the beautiful Martiniquan
30 you said made you happy, she made you so happy, you a tormented playwright
31 sadness returns, the apparitions of my brothers

32 and my mother grows old thinking about them
33 and also seeing so much sadness in me her living and dying son
34 my mother who wishes me happy, who wants me to relive the son
35 she lost to poetry like a husband a wife to a trusted friend
36 but already the walls are closing around me

37 the rain has stopped and once again I am alone
38 waiting for them, the politicians of our country to come for me
39 to silence my right to shouting poetry loud in the parks
40 but who can shut up the rage the melodrama of being Sierra Leone
41 the farce of seeing their pictures daily in the papers
42 the knowledge of how though blindfolded and muzzled
43 something is growing, bloating, voluptuous and not despairing
44 I say to you for now, I embrace you brother.
[Page 70 ]
PART II POEMS IN CONVERSATION WITH DEATH
45 'Escriban lo que quieran

46 En el estilo que les parezca mejor
47 Ha pasado demasiada sangre bajo los puentes
48 Para seguir creyendo
49 Que sólo se puede seguir un camino
50 En poesía se permite todo.
51 A condición expresa por cierto
52 De superar la página en blanco.
53 'Write as you will
54 In whatever style you like
55 Too much blood has run under the bridge
56 To go on believing
57 That only one road is right.
58 In poetry everything is permitted

59 With only this condition, of course:
60 You have to improve on the blank page.
NICANOR PARRA
61 'Murio Mi Eternidad Y Estoy Velandola.

62 Died My Eternity and I Am Waking It.
CÉSAR VALLEJO
[Page 71 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE GRAVEYARD ALSO HAS TEETH [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-:
(In memoriam: for Manfred and Theophilous)
1 Today I have seen a mother's tears today at the cemetery

2 by the tombstones!
3 a mother holding the wreaths in her heart
4 between the ventricles from where a christian God
5 has fled fixes the stones son to son!
6 that woman a mother with two stones in her chest
7 in place of breasts
8 wails raves and pulls her hair for her sons
9 waxed in their mummy looks:
10 that woman is my mother!
11 Ah my mother
12 I too have been in agony so long
13 I do not even remember how to laugh
14 my mother is weeping today perpetual cothurnus

15 my mother's pain oppresses her look
16 I feel her in my soul!
17 my mother's eyeglasses are in my heart revealing its pus
18 If I had two souls which one would I give to my mother
19 If I had two hearts which one would I give to my mother
20 O my impossible heart!
21 I touch the wind my mother's marasca voice

22 not a voice in the air to savour the dead men's souls
23 not a voice in the leaves with which I paint on my face
24 the horizontal language of pain
25 for that woman who does not understand her son
26 the intense poetry of his soul!
27 not a voice in his fist but a voice in microwave
[Page 72 ]
28 singing the shadows of five mummies

29 sprung from that mother's umbilical cord
30 my three brothers dead!
31 my two sisters dead!
32 to march in death with them
33 not counting the other deaths in my family stream ...
34 now alone which way shall I turn to face the sun

35 when those who sang the bitter litanies of time
36 no longer hold for me the key to my life
37 I think only that I am César Vallejo reborn

38 at least in my pain!
[Page 73 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : HAEMORRHAGE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 It is this day that I feel ... heart!

2 this day of murderous eyes savannah woman
3 your sons at once living at once dying
4 breathing each breath of solitude for that same life
5 which saw them sad tasting their deaths
6 mother!
7 I have not known my image blue
8 I have not known my waters mild
9 only these gnats which gnaw at my heart
10 galvanic the day which saw my sorrow

11 galvanic my penumbra tree to tree
12 my blood of iguana
13 my tongue of serpent
14 galvanic my centuries of delusion!
15 between water and flame talking to my mother

16 my mother sits facing the night not seeing her son
17 who talking in his nightmare wakes suddenly
18 with the voice of a great river
19 rising in his head
20 accompanied by demons!
21 two demons thus:

22 come from my invertebrate ancestry
23 two demons
24 from my brothers who laugh who laugh Dionysian men
25 they have not tasted the sun
26 the way I have tasted it
27 otherwise they would understand
28 why I ache so much in my soul
29 why my name is Syl Cheney-Coker!
[Page 74 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : PUTREFACTION [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 Returning home to my country from Spain

2 on a plane full of Argentines
3 this perdition which follows me
4 from sea to sea:
5 death was in my corridors
6 death was in my fist in the viscera
7 in the loud greeting of the grasshoppers' wings
8 a plethora of deaths
9 in the myriad silences multiplying the hours
10 and my father slumped in the hollows of his heart

11 strikes a phantom of death!
12 my father feigning life
13 but already married to a vegetation of deaths
14 also the other one there ... Manfred

15 a man tied to the cruel matron of death
16 primeval flower lost in early May
17 ah! to forget that man

18 animal of the saliva of bitter regrets ...
19 I arrived at that hour

20 dressed in the vestments of the virgin
21 to cultivate the sea's madness
22 to remake god and man on the cuneiforms of the tarpon
23 but death was in my footsteps
24 brothers I take the cerements of the spirits

25 to dress myself in them
26 leaving the twenty-seven bells of the bull
27 to echo the sizzling of this flame
28 already flaring up in the jungle of my heart!
[Page 75 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : PORTRAIT [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
For George Jackson
1 Yo no me duelo ahora como artista
César Vallejo
2 I am this man Syl Cheney-Coker

3 I have my impossible heart suffering immensely
4 like the Africans on Robben Island 3
5 from right and left I feel the twin needles of my pain
6 Africa and America piercing my life
7 and conjure up hallucinations at night
8 to make my life nauseous
9 I will tell you about my life

10 on the Sierra without a word adrift on the shores
11 to measure the drowner scorpion of his suicide
12 and man, man with his impossible heart
13 nurtured on the grave note of the nightingale's song
14 in the San Quentin of his day the Folson of his night
15 on the ebony of his brow
16 scalded with the plethoric struggle
17 for my one Soledad for the two sons of my pain
18 and the dead man who adds the twenty-eight deaths
19 in his life to the tail-end of my life!
20 I know that man in the prison of his soul

21 I know him in the death given him by the terror of his elan!
22 without wings or legs I go breasting my heart

23 against the death of George Jackson
24 that man who suffered my pain!
25 I see in their lair the marks of their teeth on his body
26 I see in his blood the men who sing, sing America
27 led by the Ku Klux Klan
[Page 76 ]
28 and today without even a stone to mark my grave I die

29 because in him they lynched me twice
30 because in me they lynched him twice
31 throwing his soul to the gila monster
32 and afterwards man in his death existing in his freedom

33 exist also that mother with her two sons
34 exist also the python
35 exist also America, Hydra swallowing the Blacks
36 I am this man Syl Cheney-Coker

37 I have my impossible heart suffering immensely
38 like the Africans on Robben Island!
[Page 77 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : SEA-SERENADE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 I am drawn to the sea at night

2 as it knots my grief in circular waves
3 bringing its death-perfumed breath
4 close to my lips!
5 on a rock I watch a black crab move nearer by
6 with eight wobbling legs
7 under the immense pain of its life
8 and seeing this crab I feel I am near to my shadows
9 I understand them smelling their putrid souls!
10 now facing them pained on this volatile night

11 I count the thorns sprouting from my heart
12 for that brother who fled from his mother
13 on the sphinx's wing!
14 but in the morning at the cemetery

15 there will be no flowers no woman
16 will come to dress his wounds with a kiss
17 I see already the flight of the innocents
18 and the blood running down the eyes of the spirits
19 thrown above the laughing cliffs
20 ah to depart this comatose life swallowing the fleas

21 to dodge the passover hand of God
22 to leave consecrated bread and fasting blood
23 mother to you that is given the tribulations of Job
24 indeed! indeed! indeed!
25 I ask what remains of this catalepsy
26 only the necrology only the necrology!
[Page 78 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THEY HOLD SIEGE AGAINST HUMANITY [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1 For once to go on forgetting my nightmares

2 the noise and the psychoanalyst and the sad
3 monologue of the river under the executioner's house
4 also the mother who defies the violent blows of the cadavers
5 stoical trenchant double-barrelled grief ...
6 for once strolling in the jungle spitting out my lungs
7 if only to regain my sex for man
8 who sweats under his universal balls
9 to earn the ancient bread!
10 I do not want all this sadness today

11 now that my soul has travelled so much
12 in the canal of their insecurity Jewman and Arab
13 caught in the crossfire of passion
14 I do not want you fields of Vietnam
15 Christ in them they make their laboratories
16 and Moses with his grey beard has thrown the testaments
17 to the howling guns at night
18 and after the fertile womb wastes down the nile

19 from between the thighs I watch
20 the eleven and sixty-two drops of the apparition
21 who comes knocking at my door demanding
22 a father
23 but when at the musical the concerto

24 leaves the conductor's eyes and the wandering gypsy
25 silences her flamenco
26 and at the cinema they turn off the lights
27 after showing the Battle of Algiers
28 and Moshe Dayan sits smoking the hookah seated on
29 the Arab woman's thighs
30 give me from their delight a daughter with muscatel lips
31 for my poet's concupiscence.
[Page 79 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE ROAD TO EXILE THINKING OF VALLEJO [from Cheney-Coker,
1 Like others I get drunk in my blood

2 hiccuping and await the souls of my brothers
3 perennially on the song composed by the heliotrope heart
4 at midstream where the spirits walk
5 undisturbed!
6 excellent then, this sudden shower of locusts
7 expanse of cortege and the two roads
8 of the cemetery where time has its teeth

9 in the flesh of a mother who oxidizes her soul
10 with the waters of the passion-flower
11 as May is a brother just as October was a brother
12 linked to the prodigal who declares:
13 Mother I want to return into exile to be your poet!
14 hearing this, my mother seized by an element of nature

15 wondering whether I am going or staying seeing the roads
16 in my eyes, turns a terra-cotta sister and her hair
17 once black illuminates the night with its premature whiteness
18 my mother prevents my flight into myself

19 speaking to me through her silence through the beat of her heart
20 being that she loves me that she is always herself double
21 the sword fighting my days the lamp lighting my nights
22 when my heart sinks deep in the oasis
23 of its pain! she rejuvenates me calling back the me
24 that has died tracing the man-child to the poet
25 without understanding the dictates of my soul
26 blood absent from my soul my dog-starved days

27 on the peninsula of my Sierra Leone
28 my legacies which I counted in five carcasses
29 dancing drunk in the terrible summers
30 and that cruel winter polyphonic in verse
[Page 80 ]
31 when I loved that woman without first learning how to live

32 I bled one night shedding poems from my heart!
33 It is recorded then: I'll die in exile!

34 thinking of my Sierra Leone
35 this country which has made me a poet
36 this country which has honoured me
37 with the two knives of my death passed crisscross
38 through my heart
39 so that I can say to a bleeding mother:
40 Mother I am returning into exile to be your poet!
[Page 81 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : I RETURN INTO MYSELF [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard
1 And this is how they will remember me

2 lowering my coffin my phosphorescent skeletons
3 in which I came into myself my heart fetishes multiplied
4 my ubiquitous lice multiplied to go down remembering
5 the hunger which elongated my throat
6 the throat which elongated my hunger
7 within these bright walls of my coffin
8 to see better the cheeks of a man wailing in his gangrene
9 with frogs in his throat!
10 on another plain I could be your clairvoyant brother

11 watching your steps metallic angle that they gave you
12 saltpeter brother bitter in my memory!
13 in another world you came through me seeking Theo
14 what was that liberal voice demanding that you die
15 what that parsimonious grave?
16 you died that afternoon, that afternoon
17 in New York!
18 but I, I am tied to the ancient tragedies

19 brother of Christophe brother of the Creole destiny
20 sometimes a fandango but never a plantation of my own
21 or for my brothers black entrepreneurs whose gold
22 is my flesh made gold by my three deaths
23 I die of my perdition!
24 my death of voodoo absolving all the nightmares in my life
25 for you who have entered my soul body and all
26 in this river where swims, swims your surgical face
27 in these rooms where walks your apparition
28 because to forget you Manfred I must destroy them
29 insidiously like those who guard the diamond mines
30 of my country where Africa is disembowelled!
[Page 82 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : LOOKING FOR THE SPIRIT AT NIGHT [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-:
1 Before my house drinking the peaceful frangipanis

2 a family of coconut palms shading the nudity of the beach
3 before my house the termite-infected lemon trees
4 and the slow movement of the iguana on the iroko tree
5 it is here that I hear the concerto for death
6 the wailing cicadas and the howling bats
7 and the monotonous croaking of the frogs
8 Sierra Leone with its sad eyes and the medicinal impulse
9 of a late vulture clearing carcasses off the road
10 are they brothers of the soul or skeletons of the hour
11 tonight being Sunday Juba is humid and feeling this heat

12 I think I'll like to open the antennae of my head
13 to catch one word one flowering word of hope
14 before the rain which threatens the night
15 here where I await the spirit come to live with me
16 for to be a brother of that spirit ... Manfred
17 I write you I call you I make this poem a fountain of your memory
18 where I drink your delicate fragrance
19 and then I can walk through open doors
20 searching for you hoping that your face is no more a shadow
21 that you are no more bronze than flesh
22 brother!
23 but tonight is so peaceful I am drinking my soul

24 the cicadas the iguana the vulture and the frogs
25 the termites the beach the gigantic moths
26 the invading butterflies chased by the geckos
27 and the matter-of-fact overdose of my deadly solitude!
[Page 83 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : ORPHAN [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 Hay un vacío
2 en mi aire metafísco
3 que nadie ha de pal par
4 el claustro de un silencio
5 que habló a flor de fuego
César Vallejo
6 I was visited by Christ and his army of saints

7 and commanded surrender your soul
8 to the tree of life lacking fresh growth
9 in its roots ...
10 I am a deserter of your soul

11 your god-tortured soul
12 my own will await me fresh growth
13 springing from the wounds in my life
14 spirits of water abiding in seashells

15 a galaxy of mummies beneath which they fix
16 a bed of bones for my existential self ...
17 the word is sacred when I tell you
18 my soul was made porous following a deluded Christ
19 I am a deserter of your soul

20 my own will await me image of fire
21 image of life I curl in my hands
22 the orphan of bitter years!
[Page 84 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : VIATICUM [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
1 Edging through self, the man who meditates

2 traveller in his dreams: his wretched soul
3 notwithstanding he forges, cultivates life
4 which is a grenade in his heart.
5 strange vertebrate of the hour when death is dawning
6 unfolding in octopus form its adroit self
7 this man in his nightmare lost poet of Babylon
8 who dutifully sings his funeral song
9 and signs in pain the will of his tormented life;
10 what he has eaten is the flesh of the stone
11 what he has given is the blood of the tapeworms
12 to mix with the toxic blood of those who wish him dead
13 on his horizon a rainbow opens up and reveals

14 in terror his angel of lust god of the thunderstorm of night.
15 in vain does he seek his Apollonian world
16 because his poetry was the saddest of all
17 and where they await him his place is the most disastrous of all:
18 Oh to be his mother lamb of the pursuit
19 man the mule on whose back the whip cracks
20 to be the skeleton of the vulture's feast
21 he favours in death what he sorrowed in life
22 but do you hear him when he cries
23 with his soul racing through the garrison of death?
[Page 85 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE LONGEST HOUR A MAN LIVES [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
1 My brother's long pantomime

2 demoniacal to say the least
3 my brother's made proclivity hidden in his olympian shell
4 in the hour when he is no longer man but a phantom cadaver
5 my brother's mad proclivity hidden in his olympian shell
6 and fell the son plundered in an inscrutable god ...
7 there are lichens in the hole in which I fell
8 and felt in degrees my filigreed thorns!
9 man comes to labour like the brute guanaco

10 a modern Nebuchadnezzar without the pleasure of a crown
11 his back to the sun forgetting the pain which tore the woman's belly
12 in her cannibal ecstasy!
13 see how his luminous god descends and wrenches from his hands
14 the child of his soul atrophied by his bad blood
15 see how his hair turns grey scented with the wild perfume
16 of my burnt cheeks
17 antediluvian troglodyte bellowing in his pain
18 alone in his torment man does an ellipsoidal dance

19 like a demon borne on the branch of the god-tree
20 in vain does he stretch his oesophagus for the bread of his life
21 peasant brother linked in common suffering to the Vietnamese
22 in this his longest hour sanctioned by the church!
23 but by what does he tell Christ
24 when his hour is dawning in the necropolis?
[Page 86 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : POEM TO A GUITARIST [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard
For Desmond Easmon (1946-65)
1 Death laid its touch

2 cruel upon your brow
3 primordial youth drowned in early October
4 the group gripped
5 by the savage seizure
6 of the sea's assault
7 spun the grey cloak of mourning
8 Oh the silver chimes of leaving
9 the silent cavalcade
10 moving to your marriage with the dead
11 spades of parting
12 dug inside the virgin earth
13 wet with the tears of your clan
14 you lay cold the early fruit of your tree
15 snatched by the force of the day
16 crimson blood gold studded kisses
17 and the tunes of the several guitars
18 rest on the soil of your parting
19 sleep well Tamba.
[Page 87 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : POEM FOR A GUERRILLA LEADER [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
To Amilcar Cabral
1 Solitude supporting solitude on two pergolas

2 sunset shaping summer where the jungle closes in
3 man eating roots leaning on the theories of Fanon
4 it was there in his shadow that I saw the primordium of Africa
5 slaves supporting treachery behind sweet fraternal looks

6 minions of the bourgeoisie mingled with serfs
7 I know it all in serpentine bliss
8 feeling the tongues of fire obfuscating my life
9 cheek to cheek with that man in his solitude
10 murdered in his finest hour
11 by fratricidal negroes, brothers of lust!
12 to speak of his name I shed my sorrow

13 near this sea tormenting my memory with the cargoes of black flesh
14 bought with what portuguese asientos
15 sacred to the delight of the pope?
16 Ah when the journey was long sweetening the pain
17 my destiny to be born a slave enriching these brothers
18 who eat the flesh of wild boars ...
19 my sadness knows it all piercing my heart!
20 and now the defoliated island rises colourless

21 the grass is the hands of those maimed by napalm
22 man-child leaping over the mutilated soul shouting
23 mother I am going away to be a revolutionary
24 to remake my brother I heard saying
25 O island O field you Cape Verde daughter in spoilage.
[Page 88 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : I HEARD A GOD LAUGH LAST NIGHT [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-:
1 A child talks to me behind closed eyelids

2 talks to me convulsively like the thunder of hooves
3 what a bone this child who doesn't say
4 mother but runs a river of tears between those eyelids
5 that want to but do not open
6 how I watch this child in his crib crowned image
7 of the other one who died after turning eleven one October day
8 his vexatious form a scandal of surrealism
9 contorting the contours of his face
10 he yells, unable to see this blind child
11 born to a grieving mother I love
12 there are gods of form the imperfection of malice

13 like a curse running along hospital corridors at night
14 like tragedies that plunder our designs
15 they lurk in catacombs, grow beards and whisper
16 in drainages, they sit in sad bedrooms with clubfoots
17 and ridicule the intimacy of lovers
18 they are the phalanges attacking the ramparts of the soul
19 they fill oases with terror and cut deep trenches
20 in the hearts of the pious, they combat the priests of the young
21 there are reasons to live and reasons to die
22 but don't we all love today only to be sad tomorrow?
[Page 89 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : AGONY OF THE LOST POETS [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
1 sufro de aqual amigo que murio

2 y que era como yo buen carpintero
Neruda on Vallejo
3 From continent to continent the lucid tessitura

4 the tongues that spoke against the dragons of terror
5 tongues savouring the primaeval man
6 between the waters of his desires
7 from Santiago de Chuco the Indian mother
8 who bore the last child Cesar Vallejo
9 wrapped in his Peruvian leaves
10 and poetry his sad brother
11 gliding over his piscean soul!
12 from island to the charnel-house

13 adumbrating the marginal man
14 Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo
15 the little Madagascan exiled in his heart
16 the starved man whose destiny mother
17 was to be a poet!
18 where did the pain begin, where did the passion hit him
19 the pathetic man, the alcoholic man, the drug man
20 where did his death begin, the man who siffered Paris
21 but never seeing it, never seeing it!
22 that morning waxed in his bones

23 starved to the knife's edge
24 they buried César Vallejo
25 preserving his Andean dignity
26 that afternoon in his cadaverous shell
27 they found Rabearivelo dead from a poet's whim
28 and today I mourn them, the world which killed them
29 but never their songs
30 the same world in whose face their verses explode
31 like a violent brushfire!
[Page 90 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE HUNGER OF THE SUFFERING MAN [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1 Sweating between his fingers, the agricultural man

2 sweating in his thorax the musician
3 sweating in his lungs the miner
4 sweating in his nausea the existential man
5 sweating in his refugee camp the Palestinian
6 driven out by the Jew who has forgotten Auschwitz
7 sweating in his ghetto the blackman
8 sweating in his carapace the animal-man
9 sweating when he escapes the innocent man
10 sweating in their duodena the children
11 battling the pigs on the garbage dump
12 sweating the woman whose urgent sex
13 brings me my brief joy
14 sweating the poor man whose house starves between the thighs
15 sweating the deadman, the marginal man
16 who wants his bones enamelled in gold
17 sweating the poor who died from the too, too rich
18 sweating the bronze man who suffers them all
19 sweating I who sing them!
[Page 91 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : HE FALLS, THE INVERTEBRATE MAN [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-:
1 And today I drink the riotous water

2 and rise puffing at each drink between my fragile metacarpus
3 between these same fingers where on a morning already forgotten
4 the phoenix man escaped striking me hard in my passion
5 and who is that man who has not lost something
6 the man without his infinite mother his ubiquitous brothers
7 the man who said 'pardon me' licking his lice sisters in his blood
8 the cane man with his immense dignity brother from some
9 unnamed plantation where the bad blood of his ancestry flows
10 the damned man strange to the river of his passion
11 the one who hasn't got a cause like a deluded Christ
12 without his cross image of my soul
13 once I howled Africa trumpeting all my sorrow

14 you were the witness Africa of that plantation madness
15 you and I dancing to our fallen history
16 here is the monument to my disgrace the ship hailing my chagrin
17 and the four centuries of shame like a halo over the head of my country
18 and how the angelic bell rings welcoming you Granville Sharpe
19 the image of the passage I dare not name each bank of the river
20 not knowing which storm had plundered them in the night of their grief
21 my luckless voyagers dumped on the spot where no grass
22 has grown with propitious scions
23 and who is that man who has not lost a brother

24 and who is that man not robbed of a cause
25 the man who does not exit before his phalanges of pain
26 the man who has not woken up without even his sap to quench his thirst
27 the man who goes and comes from his glacial tomb
28 It is the invertebrate man behind whose shadow I count my steps!
[Page 92 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE SONG INSIDE THE CHARNEL-HOUSE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1 You ask me how I exist kneading

2 the cacophonous beat of my putrid heart
3 how a man separates the pain from the pleasure
4 living inseparably as he does from an annual ambience of pain
5 the pained vertebrate the lost voyager

6 telling each other about that crepuscular journey
7 taken one lascivious morning pilloried in my head
8 you long to live rejoicing in your memory---
9 but suffer inexorably from your germinal soul
10 tell me from what plantation you take your bad blood
11 where you go a river awaits you

12 not long but one you cannot forget
13 flowing strange from the memory of those who sang drunk
14 in the charnel-house the tune of my disgrace a memory
15 of sunken ships here begins the history of my people
16 the agony of the child who frantically searched
17 for the radioactive word loose upon the lonely beach
18 apocalyptic philanthropist of my quest!
19 to spread bad blood and rape was that their task

20 I come to the sea where without malice or hate
21 it is likely that one morning in 1789
22 the luckless voyagers to the tune of their plantation hearts
23 made my Sierra Leone the agony of a continent
24 he sleeps St Phillip my abandoned saint

25 the convert offers a ciborium of blood
26 blessed is the blood that is wine for all
27 blessed be the chalice denied the poor
28 the man who comes but never returns
29 orgiastic the hunger that emblazons his eyes
[Page 93 ]
30 and blessed is the dog that howls in hunger

31 keeping watch over the fallen man!
32 but as for me I am at the sole end of my quest

33 my hands open to the cross of a Christ
34 whose words confirm my deluded hopes
35 like this hourglass keeping time with those
36 whose bad blood draws the water of a river
37 polluting my country the look of frenzy
38 of men dancing in the night aping my conscience
39 euphorically!
[Page 94 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : DELIRIOUS GOLD, TWIN-HEADED DEATH [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1 Trenches dug at night away from the esplanade

2 the singing nightingale my own dirge escaped
3 from lips pouting clouds of rage ...
4 mountain of the bleeding country
5 coruscating with scorn
6 you look upside down the truncated beast
7 and give fresh venom to my words
8 stones circling in waters the innocence of words

9 sprouting like carrots from the bleeding earth
10 hills that are loose in the expectancy of doom
11 and the ventriloquism of men piling disasters
12 upon the funeral pyres
13 you were sanguine and now you have drunk
14 you were hungry and now the slit beast
15 grows horns inside your throat!
16 trenches dug at sunset the blood coloured town

17 we go down Vercingetorix go down like a circus of apes
18 black gold delirious, twin-headed death
19 that which they promised us
20 to live one's life below one's death
21 to stand on one's own backbone in one's own grave
22 that which they promised us---never!
23 we come at morning armoured with truth.
[Page 95 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : CHEEKBONES, SOB: THE HUNGER THAT EXPIATED THE SOB [from
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 Something takes him by the throat decalcifies him

2 atavistic his sad day of an uncle minus the exiled hour
3 and the violence of the passion for an odalisque
4 hermaphrodite woman in whose eyes

5 the eunuch raises and lowers his dreams
6 the man who is starved thus and his destiny
7 to be born in this centruy against whose image
8 he mirrors his heart demanding
9 why he has fathered the pain of the child
10 lost in the sea not searching for the mummified heart
11 or splitting the bellies of cetaceans
12 to learn how over the centuries cadaverous man
13 has swallowed his gangrene but searching all the same
14 and who has given him this chalice of gold

15 to drink consecrated wine to the God-carrying
16 troops of saints, the follower of Chrysostomos
17 suffering man, minute by minute as you exude
18 the air of the pain stitched between the lines of your cheeks
19 that others may read how you suffered the hunger
20 that expiated the sob the sob that expiated the hunger
21 shivering, walking diagonally between cadavers

22 bent over their souls walking boulevards of sob
23 dreamer of hyperborean days fleeing
24 days that weep your duodenum on Tuesdays
25 coriaceous days never slackening up
26 summer days of septicaemic weeks
27 winter days of aneurysmal months
28 armadillan days that close your jejunum in scales
29 integer the great velocity of the howling days
30 and the tremor inside your cupboard of sob!
[Page 96 ]
31 surrealist you weep the litanies of trees

32 weep drought and desert for the carrion of droughts
33 weep grotto shut from cold when it rains
34 weep breaking the scales from so much weight
35 weep how desperately, pneumonically
36 tasting the dirty waters from his cheeks
37 the suffering man enjoys the delirium of death!
[Page 97 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : NIGHT OF ABSINTHE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also
1 My luckless brother feigning a god beyond man

2 pachyderm life like the great sorrow
3 of the Jew of Kafka, O tenebrous man!
4 who listens to that man in his cranium
5 who talks in his dreams without the Freudian word
6 pressed, pushed and standing in his skin
7 so that the primitive of his being resembles
8 the ductile facetious ape, the superlative dwarf!
9 shaped in my cyma he whines, curved like Job

10 lowering his jawbones, the ancient mandibulars
11 and comes to me through the animal sense
12 thus do I declaim him, love him, knead him
13 and fall vertical with him in his slime
14 to know that life, the night of absinthe

15 never the sun's coefficient, that piece of cocaine
16 that will kill the gnats gnawing at his entrails
17 or the child of his desire to succour him now
18 beyond the alpha and omega of his dreams
19 to go on then, like death that grows from the agony
20 that lacerates life, that kills that dog licking her menstrual wound
21 he who must deny God to find the sphinx's path
22 and the river that flows from his tumescent pain
23 behold that man in vertigo

24 his diaeresis opposing halves without his syllables
25 brother I see in your eyes your sundays without psalms
26 your tuesdays that come without your mondays
27 and if your cock crows let me see you fall on your Golgotha
28 for I tell you the pain that grows from my bottle towards you
29 has no name nor that bottle a colour!
[Page 98 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE CARCASS THAT RESEMBLED THE STONE [from Cheney-Coker,
1 Throwing water at the stone of all that is ancient,

2 it is enough that I have lived in my neighbour's shadow
3 worn his shoes and walked in his steps behind his death
4 enough that I have ridden in his procession
5 dressed with my tears and not in my clothes

6 now I would like to cancel myself out between the toes
7 finally to heave in my tracks all my cerebral pangs
8 the flames of my skeletons where all may dance saying
9 enough that he lived the sadness stuck in the vertebra
10 the desire grows from the water grows scarlet and fire
11 I hold ten capsules dreamer of euphoria hungrily
12 sapping the blood of dead lovers one September morning
13 to live off my own worms not cutting deep the blood
14 of water mermaids and hunger the sister of the drowner
15 lovesick from the hyacinth that will cure his bad blood
16 or perhaps the rhythm of a conga drum beating for others
17 a luminous ray of African sunshine
18 childhood when the blood was sold to the sea

19 you who wonder at the suffering man's life
20 weeping gravely the dog that barked inside his soul
21 I lost my brother thinking of the pure light to life
22 his death trickles over my body making me lecherous
23 as I come to the sea to drink from the silent water
[Page 99 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : GOING HOME SUFFERING HOW HE CAME SHRIEKING! [from
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth with Concerto For An Exile: Poems ]
1 Solitude of the water and the silence of the eucalyptus

2 of the moods man comes seeking that which was stolen
3 from him by God who like the phoenix salts the pain grown enormous
4 breaking sheets of water like the cancer of life
5 solitude when the song escapes, the profusion of poetry

6 dripping bit by bit from his perforated heart
7 and solitude when the song returns to strip the heart
8 of so much poetry; corrosive metalloid and bronze
9 pitiable man like the crab lost from the sea
10 following death at sunset, a pageant beloved death
11 O pathetic, terra-cotta man suffering with me!
12 suffering you I burnt my nails inside my cavity of flames

13 and measured to perfection the timber that weighs on my death
14 how sad the night of your exit, whipping your conscience

15 for not re-living Job for not bearing the cross of Christ
16 and the begger who limps beside your shadow a collection of bones
17 of Vallejo in whose coffin my own shadow breathes
18 the tragedy of not knowing when man comes into the world
19 the tragedy of not knowing when man exits between the groins
20 his lamentable sobs, his disastrous appetite for love
21 the pain of carrying his backbone like a monument to God
22 the pain of all he suffered drinking and will suffer
23 for Christ at the eucharist and finally falling inside the grave
24 I am going to close my tremendous chest of scales

25 brother, close my enormous heart of grill and then
26 exit, suffering the way I came shrieking at dawn!
[Page 100 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE ABSENCE THAT STRIKES THE MAN DOWN [from Cheney-Coker,
1 Struck by your shadow your great plethoric life

2 struck in vertigo and struck standing beside your soul
3 struck being so much of your peripatetic self
4 and likewise struck when you pass with no one calling you
5 and finally struck from wanting to be perpendicular to your death
6 political man when I return to greet you in your grave

7 on the tiptoes so that you do not hear me
8 writer filling your prosaic void
9 wearing your garment of fire like a blade
10 sealed to the chest you who are alive
11 confessed by your enormous throat said in your handkerchief
12 by your great torso stretched alongside the infinite
13 a summary of thirty-five years and nothing more!
14 I am going to stay here listening to your groins

15 to egrets feeding on the worms that come off your corpse
16 to nails sliding down inside your paws
17 the great volcano of your heart and the magic

18 of your image inching harshly to us all
19 mother son brothers sister rolled up your contagion
20 a summary of flying bones struck by your absence!
[Page 101 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : ON THE DEATH OF PABLO NERUDA [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
1 Your death has come to me over five thousand miles

2 while I was still mourning Salvador Allende
3 for whom you stepped down to present a united front
4 against fascism and for the defence of the republic
5 and the growth of an impure poetry (as you once said)
6 Pablo America did not swallow you nor the generals

7 who hunted you like guanaco over the Andes and across borders
8 while miners and peasants kept you underground sharing
9 their torn ponchos and bread and the fever exuding
10 the nitrate and copper exploited over the centuries
11 how generously you sang them in the Canto General
12 the misery of a continent and people parcelled out
13 like loaves by the generals and colonialists who dreamed
14 of their banana republics peopled by serfs
15 and they hounded you in Spain, in Argentina

16 they hounded you in Brazil and North America
17 with its chilling hypocrisy closed its doors
18 to you while proclaiming freedom in the world
19 they shut you out they shut a poet out!
20 I remember you fleeing on horseback

21 over cathedrals, minarets and the battalions of Spain
22 to the call of your destiny I remember
23 the ballads of the widows and the scent
24 of ceremonial virgins drinking your poetry
25 the only wine they had I remember your sad cancerian eyes
26 and the lover killing himself because your poetry
27 had become his lost sweetheart
28 I remember the hunger inside the incest-infested barrios
29 and the death crawling like a priest inside the taverns
[Page 102 ]
30 I remember your great arms wrapped round the agony

31 of the poets who opposed Franco who opposed humanity in Spain
32 now you lie breathing like a permanence of parnassian gods

33 on the Isla Negra the flat-footed gulls
34 have come to sing you the immemorial dirge
35 and the condors always carniverous like the capitalists
36 who dream of nubile virgins and stock exchange
37 have stayed away from the carrion at night
38 and the iguana is listening in his twilight
39 listening and watching dressed in your sombre verse
40 the great anaconda fearless and sad like your continent
41 unfolds slowly colouring the muddy river
42 with the umbrage of Sinchi Roca
43 and the fiery puma struck by the arrow of your death
44 has carried your message of flames to Hernandez
45 Garcia Lorca and your great friend Cesar Vallejo
46 I see Ruben Dario building the ruins of Nicaragua

47 as a monument to your immortal light
48 I see Cesar Vallejo among the stones of Macchu Picchu
49 awaiting you to wrap your icy heart inside his Indian sadness
50 and others like myself little accomplished craftsmen
51 scattered like seeds nourished by the sun of your face
52 mourn you because to have known you Pablo
53 was life spiced with cinnamon, wine, jacaranda
54 mimosak rivers, alpaca, ravines, and love
55 but above all the verisimilitude of how poetry
56 remains the purest path to living and suffering life!
[Page 103 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : LOVE-FLOWER FAREWELL [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
1 Today I understand better the power of solitude

2 counting the empty hours in front of my typewriter
3 hands folded under my chin
4 lost in the melancholy of Beethoven
5 and the chirping of the phosphorescent birds
6 today is like no other day heavy with pain
7 when sadness grows and the philosopher

8 has banished love with all its wounds
9 how terribly I have loved and the poetry bled by it
10 why so much poetry if it tastes only like a bitter winter
11 each page of the manuscript haunting me in retrospect
12 of May days of sacrificial man or the destitute of the suicide
13 the poet arrived too late to prevent
14 I leap through valleys like fish through water

15 seeking the power of clairaudient Gods
16 I leaf through books like antlers through forests
17 headstrong with my resolve to die
18 at which crossroad then will I put my burden down
19 at what hour will it come this death which seeks me
20 arms outstretched like an octopus loving me the way
21 I have loved others to fruition with the thorns of the game
22 how the innocent ones have killed me
23 how the guilty ones have loved me
24 I see them floating in the gulf of my nightmare
25 the albatross brings me the word:
26 'Who has never known love has never known death'
27 at summer your heart heliotropic to the sun
28 to die of the terror of love sad poetry of my soul

29 where is the orchestra that will play my funeral symphony
30 already the sea is waiting lecherous with my fits
31 mingling the drowner with the filthy algae
[Page 104 ]
32 nothing remains now but the confession of his putrid soul

33 imaginary Mary woman to a passionate eunuch
34 the poet of Christ the innocent who died disgraced
35 the way they crucified him on the hill of his passion.
[Page 105 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : DESERT MAN [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 Evidently they have dressed him up criminally

2 weighed him up in cannons so that the world hears him

3 on fasting nights of false monologue when his thorax
4 thirsts hoarsely from bottles and the desert's milk
5 evidently he reeks of my drunkenness breathes in my collar
6 thus his abdomen aches from me from the salt cut from the desert
7 he whines where they have stabbed him for being man
8 pained him in armour and since he has remained pained
9 by bayonets separating him from God
10 I myself am pained writing him this October night
11 Mediterranean man drenched in your blood

12 Nilean man have you lost your serene antiquity
13 they have bombarded the sacred places of the ancient cities
14 the dead murmur there absorbing the madness of diplomats
15 who make of the desert's sand their gold reserves
16 you suffer Moses and suffer Mohammed, do you deny it
17 the desert is in your eyes the desert drinks from the wells
18 of your eyes making you skeletal lost man
19 carrying your burden like a day riddled with storms
20 and alone in your cave you smoke your tobacco leaves
21 with a pang of remembrance of the desert holding so much blood
22 Arab blood Jewish blood that the tanks have cut
23 deep inside the heart of the desert this October night.
[Page 106 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THEY SENT AMICHAI AND AL-HAKIM TO WAR [from Cheney-Coker,
1 On the devastated landscape all is active now

2 mirages and phantoms migs and Illyusins
3 uncomfortably married without Rabbi or Imam
4 the bridal procession leaves a trail of saharan blood
5 serving napalm for the toast and bombs for the feast
6 somewhere in Jerusalem Amichai writes a poem
7 before polishing his gun for the front
8 does he fight only for his Jewish honour and forgets
9 the damage wrought by the Jew on the road to Damascus
10 in the city of waters Tewfik Al-Hakim writes no plays nowadays
11 manning tanks wrecking the carnage in Sinai
12 I wish they could talk to each other
13 the Israeli poet and the Egyptian playwright
14 under the bloodstained oriflame of Christopher Okigbo
15 a poet who understands war breathing in his skeletons
16 In the city of war they are counting the bodies

17 the generals and the stock exchange brokers
18 the newspapers make me nauseous with so much details
19 of gains in planes and losses in human souls
20 do they really want this war poets who should preserve
21 the universal purity of the life primeval waters
22 of fratricidal love joining the divided cities
23 they do not really want this war Moshe Dayan and Anwar Sadat
24 so after the funeral songs are dead
25 who will rebuild the synagogues and mosques
26 who will comfort the wailing mothers
27 with what wine to quieten the shrieking widows
28 somewhere in Cairo Al-Hakim has an answer
29 somewhere in Jerusalem Amichai has an answer
30 and I await them refusing to be quiet.
[Page 107 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE ONE THAT RETURNED A SKELETON [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1 Your wretchedness in abundance

2 does not endure you in hospital
3 it does not bring the matron weeping in your washbowl
4 does not bring your goodbye nearer your coming
5 piercing the cactus carried in bird's wings
6 poor man they have signed you off stretched
7 along the waterway without dressing your wounds
8 your chest weighs heavy you won't deny it from the medals
9 they gave you winning their wars and losing your sons
10 now they will bring out your crutches
11 you will limp to your goodbye beside your soul
12 they will tell your widow about your courage
13 knowing that you were only half the man
14 of the other they sent to the war
15 only the charity of lachrymose Fridays
16 endures you to me passing your spot
17 What a pity you were man enduring life

18 in fits in the desert's cold in trenches
19 dug in the sun what a pity man
20 that you faced Mount Heron on your one side
21 and suffered Sinai on the other, hit in the middle
22 what a pity that they call you Isaac in Israel
23 and Ismael in Cairo the same mother though
24 the belly of harvest the milk of the desert
25 what a pity that hearing your goodbye

26 the other has just fled closing his doors
27 Ah they just passed with Pablo Casals
28 after striking his last note in the exile's solitude
29 there at winter desolate water whose essence
30 I understand looking at the camel's hump
31 Ah what a pity that you were man like my heart.
[Page 108 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE DROWNER [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
For John Berryman
1 Ah! Seeing his backbone mixing with salt it is clear

2 that the pain of throwing oneself into the river
3 burns deeper in one's throat than the desire to live
4 facing one's neighbour behind sunglasses at evening
5 certainly, to lose one's father to gunshots
6 seeing the falling shadow in childhood whose agony
7 the poet writes in dream songs raving with alchohol
8 as Henry facing the chill of the Mississippi at winter
9 I mean the anguish of seeing in one eye and sweating pus
10 in the other dies in man's heart long before
11 the courage of suicide was born ...!
12 and it does not help remembering how he deceived you

13 the one who danced sweating from so much life
14 it does not help telling his wife he loved her
15 the other who threw himself into the river after saying his goodbye
16 no it does not help, does not help the man now!
17 the joy of closing one's heart walks convivially
18 beside man, lives in his sleeves, grows in his beard
19 and sends staccato pains through his heart at the musical
20 Truly, at death the drowned man shall be turned into beast

21 and likewise the slit beast into man and afterwards
22 reducing God to man, if a woman had lost a child to suicide
23 that woman shall weep reduced to a child
24 and likewise the child shall weep in skeletons
25 and seeing the worms in the skeletons
26 man comes out cold as ashes with which I close my one eye
27 the other I keep open to see at my own funeral!
[Page 109 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : I STEP OUT OF MY SHADOW [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
1 God I am happy today truly stepping over the deathline!

2 I do not bleed for Manfred do not bleed for Theo
3 in this heart given to pain, today I rejoice seeing
4 the bougainvillaea blossoming in the sun
5 delirious breasts of summer maidens!
6 I want only to live today throwing away my deathmask
7 that and my shadow which limps alongside the crucified
8 I tell you feeling you inside my heart
9 you who are always absent from me like a loved woman
10 piercing my memory but never saying Syl!
11 what is this day without the thorns of your son

12 Mohammedan day or Christian day or is it a Jewish day
13 or perhaps all three put together a radiance of hyperborean day
14 the name of this day is unknown to me
15 brother sister you who have conceived it
16 drinking muscatel during the lantern parade
17 what is the name of this day that has caught me gently
18 like a gypsy woman holding my head
19 now we face each other this day of a voluptuous woman and I

20 eyelashes of the sun drinking rum without soiling the soil!
21 today I am going to the sea across from my house

22 leaving my poetry behind, for once to be man
23 with you God, your son like the others
24 sombre at birth but who like the crucified
25 loves despite the pain of the cross
26 despite those bishops who gloatingly will deny him
27 for the flesh of the widow and remembering that
28 I wonder how long this day will last?
[Page 110 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : POEM FOR A LOST LOVER [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
To Merle Alexander
1 Eyes of heavenly essence, O breasts of the purity of breasts

2 Russian sapphire of the blue of eyes
3 O wine that mellows like the plenitude of Bach
4 Sargassian sea that is the calm of your heart
5 the patience of you loving my fragile soul
6 the courage of you moulding my moody words
7 I love you woman gentle in my memory!
8 O woman of the thirst of Siddhartha's love

9 you that I lost in the opium of my youth
10 have you fallen among the rocks off the New England coast
11 or now in premature grey nurse a stubborn tear
12 at the window watching winter's snow-coated leaves
13 here the tropical blossom of an African November
14 breathes gently on the tree of my heart
15 Oh that you could have known it woman of the sexual waters
16 heart of the spirit born of that love
17 dressing continents with garlands for whom I say
18 night strike my heart with the purest verse!
[Page 111 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : SALOME [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has Teeth
For Anna Mangahas
1 Strolling among the eucalyptus, my joy evanescent

2 like autumn flowers in the wind
3 and absinthe the pure taste of my rum drunk for the woman
4 to whose belly I clung tremulous there on the islands
5 while the sea-urchins festooned the thorns of my desire
6 for her smile of sanpagitas
7 her kiss of verbena that kills the heart that loves
8 you who turned love into a mass of putrefaction
9 you who demand the head of the son of man
10 on the broken charger of your hands
11 to feel those hands like claws round my neck

12 necklaces of my desire, my subterranean pain
13 and turtledoves mourning the splendid summer we spent
14 drinking rum and coconut water there on the island
15 I speak no more of that island of molasses fresh on my lips
16 when the tidal waves return to the black rocks
17 strewn along the coast of Masirik menstrual and sad
18 only the jellyfish breeding in your belly
19 reminds me of what the sea looks like
20 troubadour of luckless summer, I love, living with mesmerized blood

21 my soul atrophied by the sea that turned back
22 the coelacinth coming back without that ancient pus
23 in his eyes, shadow whose sadness wears the look
24 of a man in frenzy upon a lonesome promenade
25 where others may hear the cacophony of a love
26 composed in filigree of pain
27 I who so loved the waterlily
28 I who so loved the waterlily!
29 love, sweet, bitter passion
30 Pushkin's brainless aphrodite the pathway to honour!
[Page 112 ]
31 Eyelashes flickering my long sadness

32 that absinthe before and after my song
33 when I stayed behind for you
34 suffering the cruelty of your people
35 their terror that destroyed me, that destroyed me
36 prisoner of Diliman, never seeing the sun setting over the bay
37 because the city's blood vampires
38 wait to suck man's passive frailty
39 O philosopher! O Spinoza!
40 man's impotence mastered by fortune
41 to relive that summer I so wish to forget.
42 tonight I'll play our concerto

43 Brahms' great poem of the equanimity of his soul
44 but after the Hungarian finale of the violin
45 I'll lie awake putting out these charcoals in my heart
46 and will remember forever the violence of your belly
47 your bad blood that made the pacific red
48 like the two foetuses you flushed down the toilet!
[Page 113 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : HIEROGLYPH OF THE NIGHT [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
1 At this hour when all seem possible:

2 a suicide, blasphemy, the passion of the flesh
3 at this hour lowering my eyes over the funeral poems
4 which bring back my former sadness
5 O unctuous delirium!
6 at this hour taking off my shirt

7 as if my hour has come
8 at this hour realizing how I alone
9 have faced the pestiferous years
10 sweating inside my heart from sea to sea ...
11 hieroglyph of the night hiding inside my coffin

12 are you the primordial brother or the nemesis of the soul?
13 I who arrived borne on the sea

14 the song the ferryman sang bringing in the voyager
15 a history of bad blood watering the roots of a country
16 that morning like a plague in the Sierra Leone
17 of the purity of their eyes that morning beginning the misery
18 of my people the look the voyager wore disembowelling the country
19 O my land, your sadness, your death!
20 at this hour remembering how life

21 has clawed me like a grizzly bear
22 a memory of spitting out my heart without learning my quest
23 at this hour I want only to break out of this shell
24 this day of the volcano of days
25 and then cleaning my nails, strike one blow at the coffin
26 to unmask you hieroglyph of the night!
[Page 114 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE WAY THINGS STAND NOW [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The
1 I draw near you water remembering the harsh summers

2 summer of Orpheus, summer of the festival of deaths
3 of my white brother made white by barbiturates
4 of my black brother made black by the look of my sadness
5 and my mother who waits at the gates of the cemetery
6 without flowers because there are no flowers to recall
7 you Manfred no flowers to sing you Theo!
8 the night equals my presence dressed in solitude

9 I cherish my life under the blows of that life
10 this night I am smoking my pipe as never before
11 although the water in my head makes it sour
12 certainly, I tell myself it is over, the road to the cemetery
13 the teeth of an amazon May like her brother October
14 and the summer of tall books fiery like shadows
15 all is over now even the nightmares

16 like mermaids combing my beard
17 the hypocritical relatives in mourning
18 angry because they have been left out in the will
19 only the blackbird remains who comes in the morning
20 to wake the splitting torment of my brow.
[Page 115 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : BEING AT A SACRIFICE TODAY SUNDAY [from Cheney-Coker, Syl,
1 Suddenly seeing the tomb move this morning

2 and woman like the pure water on his face
3 it is likely that he hears her
4 though he is nothing now but the sun
5 the shadow of his desert upon her soul
6 holding in her hand a phial of blood
7 and a memory of May whipping her conscience
8 for these atrophied leaves spreading rumours
9 of the unctuous life she rejuvenates
10 pouring wine upon the soil of his heart
11 and man suddenly looks happy in his death

12 he looks happy sitting on top of his coffin
13 his shadow will pass here tonight
14 I read in the blood under the eyelashes
15 I go leaping over open graves

16 and feeling breathing the desire that grew
17 when the other expired between his pronouns
18 his double atavistic life forever present
19 where they promised him death silently
20 in his passion pachyderm in winter
21 passion when it returns through your soul brother

22 not holding back the sea in the morning
23 or the bearded resolve to die heavy in one's boots
24 that expiated the agony of pleasing God
25 Now at the appointed time

26 another African is hounded to death
27 down in the coalmine in Charlestonville
28 another African for twenty-five rands
29 for the Zulu brother of the Xhosa desire
30 for whom O sea reliving my bitter passion
31 I am going to wear a new suit tonight
32 to brighten up my image savouring my death
33 before polishing my coffin!
[Page 116 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE LAST PRAYER [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also
1 And who would deny me my death

2 now that I have tasted it all
3 the cholera of evening drinking
4 from the salty water of this sea polluted
5 by the history of my country?
6 mingling its heart with the filth of my passion
7 that river sang behind the bushfire
8 showing in flames the features of a Christ
9 whose body bore no signs of his death
10 to save me as I would have saved him
11 in spite of my death the taste of the sea's salt
12 which lured me to him to be deceived by my brothers
13 as he was deceived breaking his bread
14 and what am I doing here with this wine in my head

15 my bitter jaundice to drink for those
16 who did not serve me at the feast of burnt bread
17 breaking the diptych to love my brother
18 ah to celebrate that feast the blood of your heart

19 possessing only the memory of the betrayed
20 and not the happiness of your bishops
21 the bread of your body is burnt

22 I long for fresh bread to return to you Christ
23 my death of the cheeks of the savannah
24 these hands upon my throat
25 take them away from me ... Christ!
26 I long for the voice of the nightingale

27 singing in his melancholy
28 at the hour of my nightmare!
29 and for these thorns fluttering my conscience
[Page 117 ]
30 I know already the sounds of my death

31 registered by boots clattering in my head
32 bringing out these bloodclots the gifts of leisure
33 stolen from the fire of the cerement
34 where all comers at the eclipse of the moonchild
35 remember the bitter taste of their lives
36 following a deluded Christ!
[Page 118 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : THE PRODIGAL SON [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also
1 To return to you God listening to the cacophony

2 of this river bringing its pain to my heart

3 to mix it with the salt of the serpent
4 lascivious woman whose body makes me lewd
5 the strength of writing this conversation
6 with that graveyard which has teeth draws
7 me near to you God, luxuriant death
8 promised solace smothering my heart!
9 the death trickles down my throat

10 sweetening my candour my violent concupiscence
11 drinking this rum I drank suffering you in life
12 eating this bread I ate suffering you in death
13 the shadows of these brothers whose deathmasks
14 I wear for the walk to the cerement
15 what I have promised to the sea is this putrid head
16 headstrong with my passion here tonight
17 eating these lice I cracked in my knuckles
18 thus I smile sneezing into the dust of evening

19 waiting for the hour of the bird of my soul
20 I sit alone talking to myself wondering
21 how I have existed with my torment not fleeing
22 from this life which weighed me down
23 thinking how my mother has aged without being my grandmother
24 and breaking through this voluptuous desire
25 into the sea's maw I keep time with the mercenary life
26 knowing that one day a bird without feathers
27 will come to piss upon a simple stone
28 beneath which breathes the putrid soul
29 of the lost poet of babylon!
[Page 119 ]
Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- : FUNERAL DANCE [from Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945-: The Graveyard also has
1 At the end of this passion sneezing out

2 these dead in my head to the beat of a conga
3 rhythm vibrating in my torment
4 my convulsion takes me by the heart
5 for the dance of the fireflies upon this ravaged beach
6 whose dirty sand I feel trickling
7 through the sieve in my head!
8 saying the goodbye to the sea these images
9 of a priest and his troupe locked in frenzy
10 putting the blood of tortoise upon their cheeks

11 against the coming of their gangrene
12 I so wish for my pestiferous heart
13 let them come tonight with my sweetheart
14 dressed in red for the kiss of my death
15 leaving no son to tell how sour the vinegar
16 of life was writing my dirge, that and the ingratitude
17 of standing upon my coffin with rum bottles
18 when all I demand in death is to be left in peace
19 they tell me the dead live in paradise
20 with no signs of their wounds
21 kissing voluptuous angels with wine gushing from their breasts
22 no need then to prolong this conversation
23 let them bring my coffin I made panting with joy
24 having no regret leaving the life that I have lived
25 to return animal without that heart
26 pissing out its oxidised blood
27 let the gypsy woman play me my final concerto
28 because I weep no more dressing in haste
29 for my flight to the graveyard which has teeth!
Juba, Sierra Leone, Quezon City, Philippines.
© Syl Cheyney-Coker 1973 and 1980
NOTES
^ [Footnote 1
This poem was first written in 1974 when they arrested Taqi and others, in another version. The present version
was written after they were hanged.
^ [Footnote 2
This poem was first written in 1974 when they arrested Taqi and others, in another version. The present version
was written after they were hanged.
^ [Footnote 3
Robben Island: the notorious South African prison.
Copyright © 1996-2020 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.

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Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- [from The Graveyard Also Has Teeth

Cheney-Coker, Syl, 1945- [from The Graveyard Also Has Teeth

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THE GRAVEYARD ALSO HAS TEETH

Concerto For An Exile

1 Venomous songs! Venomous love!

4 But song by itself is no fertile language for death

6 Words too can be sacrilegious. I learnt that from Christ at Calvary

8 Wishing to explain my death, this terrain stinking of my filth

10 It takes the savage language of a kick

11 to cure the heart of its persistent follies

16 A force contemptuous of reason.

17 The nightingale sings of his sorrow

22 my omnivorous heart? If you entered it yesterday

24 Ah! but it's closed to all smiles.

27 It has three branches but I refuse to tell

29 Ah! what stubborn head (especially mine) has ever resisted

32 The pine-needles in my eyes. That taste of love;

34 Ah walk on my terrain if you dare

36 Warning to all innocent hearts

For Tchicaya U Tam'si

1 I limp with you on every road of your passion

7 the philanthropists the beautiful assassins

16 papaloas of the plantations

26 was I captain of the ship William Wilberforce

28 then that soul my heart my soul of iron and nails!

32 thorns too visible in my smile I come to Quebec

40 solitude my destiny stay solitude stay

7 I think of Sierra Leone

20 one summer's rape gave me life

32 feet deep in my heart

1 Deserted and betrayed

6 The night is foul its equinox my bitter days

10 now I die now I live the cyclical sadness

19 reading Borges and Neruda

25 the fire in the well my eyes is it by you

27 the nightmares which winnow the sleep from my eyes

32 ah I have the nightmares in my sleep

40 certain visions have been seen

46 Oh! nail me to my cross, the two thieves also, I am they

48 and to you my brothers while you watch these deaths

1 I am in my room observing my record player covered with dust

8 the humidity of the summer pissed through the leaves

13 my rage my tears, my groaning, my raving

15 to Africa for permitting a perpetual butchery of her womb

23 to America whose pulse beats too loudly in my heart

29 Cuba is alive in spite of your insane blockade

34 there after you have seen the filth

1 Every dog asleep!

2 I move my bed across the room

4 my alcoholic head revealing my crimes

6 every hour of these nights torments me

9 then it's no longer these vertical nights

11 paint my horizon black

13 give my voyagers the stink of rotten cadavers

15 then how soon this death I plead for every night?

16 it is better that I be gone now

19 I have insulted the world with my ubiquitous humanism

22 I say paint my horizon black

27 I have enjoyed a sumptuous feast