from The Red and Yellow Nothing
VIII – Somewhere in Scotland, five African men play Mancala by firelight. As they discuss the strangeness of the land they’re in, their voices are carried on a cold, salty wind:
i
do you know what is burning
in the square
its head tilts to its chest
in quiet reflection
how different the flame is to air
how differently it comments
on the shortness of life
ii
you see his burns
and know how mercilessly
he killed the cow in the field
that tried to shield its young
iii
Their footsteps of mine.
I want to know what people
to whom I give everything
feel when they think they are me.
iv
do you remember yourself
by the deathbed
sole friend to the ghosts
of living memory
they keep your mind clean
on their hands and knees
sow tubers and grapes
v
do you remember
what you learned there
a child is his smell
and the ice will often say
remember me to summer
Only skulls and seasons-o
will live to see the future-o
Remember me though you won’t know
the things I’ve lived to reap and sow
Blue grows the darkness-o
There beneath the daylight-o
Jay Bernard is from London and works as a writer and film http://ugateamunited.com/online/celexa/ programmer at BFI Flare (London’s LGBT film festival). They are the author of three pamphlets, The Red and Yellow Nothing (IS&T Press 2016), English Breakfast (2013), and Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (2008), and have been featured in numerous anthologies and magazines, including TEN: The New Wave and Out of Bounds: Black British Writers and Place. They were part of the original line-up for two Speaking Volumes Breaking Ground tours to the USA, showcasing the best Black British writers from the UK.
This poem is taken from The Red and Yellow Nothing which was shortlisted for the 2016 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Jay has just won the 2017 award for their performance piece Surge: Side A, performed at the Roundhouse as part of The Last Word Festival 2017 and investigating the New Cross Fire of 1981, a defining moment in Black British history that claimed thirteen lives.
The Red and Yellow Nothing can be bought from IS&T here.