Nightfall, Jane Ash Corner, St. Thomas
by Ishion Hutchinson
Ice splits those millennia of canes.
They stand by the coppice
in ready patience and danger
when I pass by the barracks. A mongrel
pack, in their heat, vanishes
into a lane. Cane and silence.
____
Ash-frosts glimmer houses
sleeping by the factory.
I pause to breathe deep the molasses vat.
Progress is back, but centuries
are one here. Flogging
laughter in the schoolyard;
____
a book tortures ants, then gets
thrown into the latrine.
I hide blue bibles in tree roots,
until evenings, to take them home.
One lumps in my back pocket now; the embossed Gideon
and amphora I have not broken.
____
I am eyes in the old slave quarters.
The future will arrive in four years and burn
the river grouse green and kill
the library cormorant, whom
I had fallen for.
It will close the bible age.
____
Morning exhales pitch dark
on Peacock Hill. The rigid lines of tractors
hitched with hostel-size carts
come clear and the first cane cutters walking towards them
in burlap ponchos, most smaller
than me, or so it seems, leap over the errant-fish cistern.
From The Well Review. Reproduced with kind permission of The Well Review.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Single Poem 2017
About Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson (b. 1983, Port Antonio, Jamaica) teaches on the graduate writing program at Cornell University, USA. His poetry collection include Far District (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), soon to be published by Faber.
He first felt himself to be a poet early in childhood: poetry became a vocation in high school. ‘The rest is devotion and luck.’ That luck includes the right teachers, the right books, though he also credits his imagination’s growth to his Jamaican background, particularly ‘the landscape — its elemental power as much as the force of its historical current.’
Hutchinson’s shortlisted poem, ‘Nightfall, Jane Ash Corner, St. Thomas’ seeks to overlay landscape with history and the movements of culture: ‘Progress is back, but centuries / are one here.’ The poem handles its materials delicately, allowing them to remain both symbolic and sensual. ‘The first solid draft,’ he writes, ‘came last year after I read a poem called ‘That Place’, by R.S. Thomas, and something blistering and striking in the words ‘To return to after the bitter / Migrations,’ jolted me towards my poem.’
