Elsie - Pamela Claire Mordecai

Elsie could cuss like a sailor

rip masts too when she swept

like a storm upgrading

minute by minute trading

levels of intensity spit

shooting like sea foam from

the O of her mouth the eye

of her fury.

                     Of fourteen children

Elsie was last and lightest.

When they said she was no black,

had no fro, meagre melanin,

she don’t protest just slip

out of her blouse peel off

her vest and say “Okay: come

make we take the nipple test.”

And there they were brown crowns

resplendent on each breast.

 

“If me was white, dem would be pink.

Ink. Quink. Your belly rotten stink.

White. Black. You decent and me slack.

Hip-hip-hurray! Areolae carry the day.”

 

Elsie could cuss like a tar

Drink any tippler under any bar.

Recite Shakespeare; bring a tear

to your eye rendering Portia’s speech

to the mean moneylender from Venice:

“The quality of mercy is not strained…”

Reaching deep down for feeling

Elsie come up to make you laugh

till your sides hurt expatiating

on the nature of the selfish dirt

a leaven for the unstrained gentle

rain that droppeth down from heaven.

 

Brown Elsie could cuss like a salt

swab a deck ship invading bilge

water to hold a craft safe

let down any size anchor

haul it up with her hands

and no pulley from the blue

deep. Shin up to the topsail

unfurl a whirl of cloud

so a vessel could fly past

 

 a hurricane upgrading

minute by minute trading

levels of intensity

winding up ocean and air

thunder and fire

the very stratosphere spun

into the blackening

ire of her fury.

 

“No way I letting skin and melanin

degrees of kink in hair and booty-size

downpress the little levity that live in my

small chest, bounce in my little tits.

All that is shit. I eating pills enough.”

 

Same time she lifting up a little miss

eyes beryl green, hair streaming

down her back. “ See. She is mine

and Jesus know how she come so

because her Pa’s pink like a pig –

look how the pikni black!”

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Pamela Claire Mordecai (born 1942) Jamaica (now lives in Canada)

Source: PAMELA MORDECAI Author, Poet, Children's Writer

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