AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "HE CALLED FOR MOMMA" BY BARBADOS POET LAUREATE ESTHER PHILLIPS



ESTHER PHILLIPS, a poet, columnist, and educator, was born in 1950 in Saint George, Barbados. She attended the Barbados Community College at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill Campus. She won a James Michener fellowship of the University of Miami where, in 1999, she earned an MFA degree in Creative Writing. Her poetry collection/thesis won the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets and went on to win the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award in 2001.


She is a Sunday columnist of the Nation newspaper and editor of BIM: Arts for the 21st Century, a revival of the seminal Caribbean Literary & Arts Magazine first published in 1942.


In 2012, she founded Writers Ink Inc., a collective of Barbados’ leading novelists and poets, and the Bim Literary Festival & Book Fair aimed at bringing together writers, readers, editors, and agents.


Her collections of poetry include:

~ Chapbook, La Montee (1983)

~ When Ground Doves Fly (2003)

~ The Stone Gatherer (2009)

~ Leaving Atlantis (2015) and

~ Witness in Stone (2021)


Since her appointment in February 2018, Esther Phillips has become the first Poet Laureate of Barbados where she resides.



Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press (UK)




POEM "HE CALLED FOR MOMMA" BY ESTHER PHILLIPS



In memory of George Floyd, killed in Minnesota,

USA, by a white police office..., May, 2020


He called for Momma, and every momma of every race:

black, white, asian, hispanic, native-american,

rose up to answer the call. But one outran them all:

she and her kind were used to running

from the rabid slave hunter

vicious dogs

through the underground railway

from every street where jim crow

deemed them nothing but worthless vagabonds.


How many nights in her head had she urged her son, "Run, run.

If they catch you they'll kill you. Take the back streets and alleys

and run, run on home."


Today she hears him calling "Momma!" and she's confused:

Where is his man's voice? What terror could so grip him

that he is a child again?

And she's running, running...


until she reaches the narrow but eternal bridge she cannot cross,

and there he lies, all six foot, six of him, "I... can't... breathe"




POEM "HE CALLED FOR MOMMA" continued



Crushed by the very thing they'd run from all their lives:


four hundred years of hate in a white man's knee on the neck

of her son —

eight minutes

forty-six seconds... until...

he's... still.

She knows this kind of stillness. She's seen it many times.


*


She's holding his hand now, "Come on, son." And as they turn to go,

they hear a sound as of many waters, or a mighty rushing wind:

millions, millions marching around the globe. And the chant

on the wind is beautiful: "Black lives matter! What's his name? George Floyd!

Justice now!" And there's hope in their eyes as they turn to each other:

One day soon, one day soon and we're done with running.




SOURCE: Witness in Stone, poetry collection by Esther Phillips, published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd., UK, 2021.