Walk ’Bout
By Kwame Dawes
Bless my eyes this morning.
—Bob Marley, “So Much Trouble”
Marcus Garvey prophecize say
“One mus’ live 10 miles away,” yeah.
I-man satta at the mountain top,
Watching Babylon burning red hot, red hot.
—Max Romeo, “War Ina Babylon”
It was the prophets and the seers, they were the ones
who anointed my city holy—Kingston of dust and stone,
Kingston haunted by the ghosts loitering in the pens,
the enslaved and the enslavers, the homeless and lost,
the flesh and stench of people who have not learned
the language of futures of hope. Before the prophets and seers
the city is a makeshift dwelling, a shelter for the exploiters
and the exploited, a village of gutters and middens,
where coins are exchanged, where blood is shed,
where the dead are an inconvenience. It is words
that construct the cathedrals of memory, how a boy,
restless and seduced by the culturing of secrets growing
in his mind, forgets the difference between words
spoken and words rattling about in the soul’s case, a boy
walking through lanes and alleys, only to arrive at familiar
places, the empty cricket field, the deserted yards
and classrooms of his primary school, arriving
there to stand still and listen to the birds, the hum
of engines, the hollow echoing of memory, every
desire, every revelation, the stories in books in the ticking
library, the clandestine looks at the girls leaping
over ropes, the vocabulary of love and lust and rejection.
The wheezing boy, his nose stuffed with mucus, his skin
tender with seething mosquito bites, his shoes
worn down by the deformity of an old ankle wound,
stands there considering the sky, considering the taste
of green mangoes, considering the chaos of memory
as if there may be a holy writ to be retained. Perhaps
this terror of forgetting is the making of the prophet,
the scribe who longs to name each street, each scent
arriving and departing, this is where fear is fostered,
and perhaps art is made. Until I heard the sound
of reggae, psalming its apocalypse across this city,
I could not call it holy, until the names of this constantly
new land, broken and wrecked by storms and neglect, and then
restored in riotous green within days, without aid,
without urging, until then, I had no language for the holiness
of this Kingston—“It sipple out there,” says the griot.
“It slide out there,” says the roots man, calling me up
to the hills, and me walking, child astray, up Jack’s Hill,
aimlessly moving toward a certain absence, and then
arriving at a turn in the road, from where I see
the city laid out before me, contained by sea and mountain;
far enough to become art, glorious enough to calm
my terror of predators and temptations, from there,
a city requires psalms, songs, and the distilled language.
I can’t say I knew this then, not in such clear holy
prophecy, but the impregnation of need did happen,
the disquiet of the anticipation of an unseen forming, a kind
of lamentation long before the amassed dead drew
closer to my door. Bless my eyes, oh God, bless my eyes.
