Dub Poetry

Jesus speem!

What a sight to behold

Nubian beauty

As fine as pure gold

Went down a yard without a plan

Just taking a break from a situation

Had no conceived intentions

Until a royal rose apple forced my hand

Her royal highness firm in her Nubian skin

Standing in her rosemary bush garden, gleaming

Holding the sun in her hair

Her glory shining everywhere

Like an African rainbow caressing a mountain peak

Had to rise to the occasion before I speak

How yuh mek her God

For this visitation

I am glad

A nutmeg and vanilla Massa God

Reveal her secrets

I want her bad

A going to paint her across the sky

Right below Massa God iye

For protection night and day

Keep the predators at bay

How yuh mek her Massa God

What yuh put eena her Massa God

She had all of Queen Isis’ secrets

Athena couldn’t match her wits

Dazzling me as a magic wand

Wondered if I should dip

Or should I stand

She calculated me before I spoke

Said her love was no joke

Won’t compete with anyone

If you are taken move along

Tried to walk away, but mi heart wasn’t leaving

Put mi foot in a gear, and mi knee start seizing

A going to paint her across the sky

Right below Massa God iye

For protection night and day

Keep the predators at bay

How did yuh mek her Massa God

What yuh put in her Massa God

Your highness I proposed

Strip me of my fleshy robes

Wash my transgressions in your mineral springs

Enter mi hear, come live within

Close the doors lock the windows

I’m committing to you forever

Let me glow like the banks of the Zambezi

Nubian princess never leave mi

Comes what may I do

She said take my hand

I feel the same way too.

A going to paint her across the sky

Right below Massa God iye

For protection night and day

Keep the predators at bay

How yuh mek her God

For this visitation

I am glad

A nutmeg and vanilla Massa God

Reveal her secrets

I want her bad.

For Alton Ellis, O.D.

I couldn’t take it

Seeing you standing in line

In this time

With a meal ticket

Your black felt crown shading, just barely

Your majesty’s face

From the blazing Miami sun

Coming down without mercy

As you waited patiently, off stage

For a meal

You had already paid for in Trench Town

Father, take my hand and sit

I will serve you.

For how could I, how could they

How could we not know better

When you had given us so much

With your song dance sermons ?

How could we not know

You stopped this very dance from crashing

Long ago…

Giving us love melodies

That kept us dancing

Holding us together as one

When hungry belly suffering threatened

To make us all victims?

How could we not know you are a pillar

Of the movement that gave us our culture

That you soared before Paragons and Heptones

Feathering from Brown to Beres

To Sanchez crooning

And all the rest of us who hide

Behind blinking facades,

Trying to deny your legacy?

But let them try

For no longer will they see

Feel a weeping willow rocking steady, center stage

No longer will they feel

See black man tears bursting flowing

The gully banks of a black man’s face

No longer will they hear the cock crowing

Sunday coming…

Prepare the sweet seasoning

For the one day of the week when

Sufferers had good dining

No longer will they know

That love is all that matters between souls

And forever “I’m still in love

With you girl” will linger

The deejays will still spin you

Yesteryear souls will rock steady, get closer

At Merrytone gathering

Choking up reliving, celebrating

A time when love meant something

When the music was as sweet as honey

Pressed from live wax

Losing you is hot

Like seeing yard without Blue Mountain peaks

Unfathomable, undeniable

Father Alton…

Here Lies Jamaica, mother, provider, lover and friend.

She fought hard and struggled long.

Molested by colonizers for the bounty of her bosom and fertility of her youth;

she wept as the wayward men she fed and sheltered, raped and pillaged her indigenous children, but still she was strong.

She welcomed with open arms the stolen children of her black sister, and wept for them too as they were oppressed and beaten, forced to till and turn their adopted mother for their captors benefit.

She accepted with motherly grace, the lost children of her east Indian and Chinese cousins, and said these are my children, and from out of many they are one.

She bade her time, and watched the rapists leave, and her children rejoice, free of their oppressors, free of the men who had beaten and trod upon their mother for so long.

Her children sang, and she danced, life was good, we were free.

But these children took their freedom, and from it, took liberty - they grew lazy, grew greedy, grew spiteful, and wicked.

New found peace was broken by shots in the night and blood in the streets.

Soon before long, again a coarse hand lay on her bare bosom, while another tore violently at her skirt, but now neither hand was white, instead: one orange and one green, nor was either hand foreign, but both from her own. It is these corrupt hands that led the blind and ignorant children to tear at their mother’s flesh.

She fell to her bruised knees and wailed as what was once of wood and water became tar and cement, as her children poisoned what she had given them to drink, and made barren the land given them to toil. And so, as I speak this eulogy for our dead mother, I see you all watch, with hypocritical grief – you, who ravaged your own mother’s body, and destroyed her soul, you look at her now with broken hearts.

You holler and shriek with heartache, when you are guilty.

I admit, I am complicit in her murder, for I stood idly by while she died, I did not stop you and I did not call for help.

I watched helplessly as you let our neighbours, distant and near, take turns with her, as the rapists before had done, till she was spent and their lust satisfied.

For this guilt, I cannot watch her be buried and I will not sing at her grave.

Instead, I will leave this mournful scene, go to some distant shore and one day tell my children, and their children after them, stories of my beautiful mother, who bore such pain, with hope for her children, only to be torn apart by the same blind and hateful brood.

And my children will tell me, that nothing so beautiful could ever have existed, and that I am a liar, and they will be right for she no longer does exist and soon it will be as if she never did.

Might our consciences never grant us solace and may Jamaica rest in pieces, for that is how we have left her.

R.I.P. 1494 - 2010