Jarita Davis
Atlantic Coasts
These boys
could be in Praia,
I think. Dried sea salt coarse
across their
shoulders. They dig
their feet into
the sand, chase
glimmers of
polished glass
and trail
tracks along the shore
leaving smudges
like their grandfathers
left on Cabo
Verde at this age.
Across the
ocean and decades
before, two
boys called each other
in
Crioulo. I picture the brown
mountains
watching from behind,
and the sea
washing up smooth
rocks and jelly
fish for them.
But they’re not
in Praia, they’re here,
we’re all here,
in New Bedford where
they dig at the
beach with sticks
and face the
Atlantic from the other
side. “What are you taking
pictures
of?” The boys ask me.
“The beach,” I
say, and they scatter
sand behind them
to collect
their
stash. “Take a picture of this,”
the younger one
suggests, holding
a twisted clump
of seaweed
and goo. The older boy is serious.
He carries
stones with important
colors for me
to photograph.
Our tie to each
other
and to the past
is the water.
They do not
discover
and uncover
bits from shore,
their home, to
remember lost
family in Cabo
Verde. This
is where they
are. This is where
we are. “Take a picture of this,”
the younger one
offers, grinning
at the snail peering
from its shell.
Defining The Morna
I want the
violin strings that scrape along
this voice’s
tremor to make an image
for you, a
piney rosemary bush I can
run my palms up
the sides of, offer
my cupped hands
to your nose and mouth
to breathe its
swoon from my damp skin
full and heavy
and pleading to be held,
these images
should have more water
like poems that
come to me in the shower
and shake my
footing loose from the tub
as I teeter and
slip and hear my own voice
calling “please
don’t—“ above the falling water
the night we
left the shutters open
to the old
rolling sea scraping back
the sand and
chasing itself into the ocean
the salt waves’
voice sang the same,
but it was
entirely new, you and I, lying
together in
bed, lying too close to touch
I step from the
shower, wipe the water
from my
shoulders -- there should be
more
water—forgetting something, that poem
given to me
before I caught myself
from falling,
and stood upright again
under the warm
slippery spray
this is the morna,
a hymn to longing,
a lyric of
faded illusions from a voice
forgotten in
the wet, begging without
remembering why
the scent of rosemary
leaves us faint
and how a moment that waits
for dawn makes
old serenades our own
Dreaming in Criolu or,
Why I Romanticize the Old Country
I dream of Cabo
Verde every night now.
A family that
owns a corner store there
remembers me
from nights before.
We smile, nod,
point between stacked rice
bags and
ceramic statues of the Virgin.
Sometimes, I
follow faint sounds
guitars,
violins, accordions
through narrow
brown and yellow streets.
I step over
uneven cobblestones beneath white
sheets where a
praça opens up. Above a crowd
circling gray
and brown, with tambourines and finger cymbals,
a woman with a bright
mouth and dress
sings to
Christmas lights strung from street lamps.
I’ve only
visited Papa’s broken fishing islands
in visions,
where a wheelbarrow jerks his father
forward,
hopping and lurching behind.
A black scarf
covers his mother’s head, she leans
over the milk
canister and a boy brings his calf
to its family
waiting beneath a stone archway.
Brava held him
in its worn nets. Too poor to keep him,
his memories
became mine. Today I have learned
to say, Bom
dia, and tonight I will not point, but speak
with my family
in their cramped corner store.
Go to UL-Lafayette Creative Writing Anthology
© 2001, University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
This site designed and maintained by The Creative Writing
Concentration of the English Department of the University of Louisiana at
Lafayette.
To contact us by mail: Director of Creative Writing, English
Department, Box 44691, UL-Lafayette, Lafayette LA 70504-4691; by telephone,
337-482-5478;
by email, jlm8047@louisiana.edu.
Last updated: May 1, 2001.