Ghazal of Guyana
by Richard Georges
Do you see? The bones of stars are falling,
crashing to the earth like trees, like greyed spears
again I find myself amidst a frieze of bodies
lost in our commune of ritual sweat
a hurricane is spinning Saharan
winds through the constellation of islands
they whisper my name from the muddy rows
of cane, reminding me, the flesh is sin
the trees ache in the light, their ashen limbs
a warning to birds: do not alight here
this tree which is not a way of breathing
of keeping your head above whipping waves
we praise in spit and surf to our God
but not to this sea which is everything
until I can not help but think that I
am again: a flesh and blood poetry
my sister can remember how to make
baigan, blistering bulbs on splitting flames
on the Parika bank of the river
a boy sells water out of a rice sack
in my office sits a stoic Ganesh
intricately carved out of fiberglass.
From Make Us All Islands. Reproduced by kind permission of Shearsman Books
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2017
Make Us All Islands
Richard Georges
About Richard Georges
Richard Georges (b. 1982, Port of Spain, Trinidad) was raised and now lives in the British Virgin Islands. Writing poetry, he says, is ‘something that I feel like I’ve always done with varying degrees of commitment and dedication’. During his undergraduate degree, he found himself ‘falling in love with images and rhyme and would find parallels between writers like Walcott and Eliot with lyrical rappers like Nas and Eminem.’
Make Us All Islands is various, familiar and challenging by turns, but keeps returning to what Georges describes as its ‘bones’: ‘Those bones speak to certain submerged narratives of the British Virgin Islands, a place which is rich in histories that aren’t well understood here, and almost unknown abroad. Make Us All Islands attempts to write those narratives into the Caribbean landscape, to fill these island-sized gaps.’
Georges finds inspiration and influence in ‘the wonderful generation of contemporary Caribbean poets writing today. I admire various aspects of their poetics, for example: Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ mastery of form, or Ishion Hutchinson’s range of language, or Shivanee Ramlochan’s honesty, or Kei Miller’s lyricism, or Safiya Sinclair’s ambition.’
