When at times
I sit and wonder
of my days in dear Antigua,
Visions of women
Seem to rise
Like a flood
Women in a long procession…
One long line of working women…
Women jogging along on donkey boxes taking provisions
to market…
Women walking to the fields in the early morning dew…
Women bent over Monday morning washtubs…
Women crouched over open firesides, preparing
family meals…
Women huckstering their wares at street corners…
Women heavy with child, yet struggling on…
Women fathers as well as mothers
Women wending their way to church on peaceful
Sunday mornings…
Women picking cotton…
Women hoeing fields…
Women bundling cane…
Women teaching…
Women serving
Women gossiping…
Women laughing…
Women loving…
Women grieving…
Women tending the sick…
Women washing the dead…
Women holding their bellies, bawling to ease the pain
of some distress…
Why does the procession never cease?
It stretches, so it seems, backward to BLACK AFRICA
And again towards this new land
Whose earth
These selfsame women nurtured
With the very sweat of their brows
And the fruits of their wombs,
And where their bodies
Buried deep in endless round
Renew the ground,
The very soil
Of this dear Isle.
Veronica Evanson Bernard (1930 - 2010) Antigua
Source: Wadadli Pen
also: Pineapple Rhymes, Blackwood Press, USA, 1989
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please keep your comments relevant and free from abusive language. Thank you. Note that comments are moderated so it may be a day or two before your comment is posted - irrelevant or abusive comments will not be published.