AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "ARCHIPELAGOS" BY JAMAICAN AMERICAN POET GEOFFREY PHILP



GEOFFREY PHILP is a Jamaican poet and novelist. Born in 1958 in Kingston, Jamaica, he attended Jamaica College where he studied literature under the tutelage of the poet Dennis Scott (1939-1991). After leaving Jamaica in 1979, he attended the Miami Dade College and later studied Caribbean, African, and African-American literature with Dr. O.R. Dathorne and creative writing with Lester Goran, Evelyn Wilde Mayerson, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. As a James Michener Fellow at the University of Miami, he studied poetry with Kamau Brathwaite and fiction with George Lamming. A retired Miami Dade College professor and alumnus, he lives in Miami, Florida.


Since publication of his first book of poems, Exodus and Other Poems in 1990, he has published six other poetry collections: Florida Bound (1995), Hurricane Center (1998), Xango Music (2001), Twelve Poems and A Story for Christmas (2005), Dub Wise (2010), and Archipelagos (2023).


He has also published two books of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien (1997) and Who’s Your Daddy? and Other Stories (2009), and a novel Benjamin, My Son (2003) which was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize. He has also written two children’s books, Grandpa Sydney’s Anancy Stories (2007) and Marcus and the Amazons (2011). He is currently working on a graphic novel for children about Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), My Name is Marcus, and a collection of poems, Letter from Marcus Garvey.


His poems and short stories are widely published, appearing in Small Axe, Asili, The Caribbean Writer, Gulf Stream, Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination, Wheel and Come Again: An Anthology of Reggae Poetry, Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse.


In 2022, Philp was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, for outstanding merit in literature. Other awards earned include the Marcus Garvey Award for Excellence in Education (2022) and a Luminary Award from the Consulate of Jamaica (2015).


Philp posts interviews, fiction, poetry, podcasts, and literary events from the Caribbean and South Florida on his blog: geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com. Also check out his official website at www.geoffreyphilp.com and stories published on Vocal Media.



Photo Credit: Vanessa Diaz



POEM "ARCHIPELAGOS" BY GEOFFREY PHILP



After Derek Walcott


At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise

and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean,

like when Hurricane Maria whipped the Atlantic

into a ring of thunderstorms that advanced

in the way Auerbach described her vision of terror:

"Wooden huts torn away from their foundations

were carried away, women and children were tied

to the ceiling beams, but no one could see a tangle

of arms waving from the roof, like branches

blowing in the wind, waving desperately toward

heaven toward the river banks for help",

and a man, chest-deep in the surge that snatched

his family from his arms in seas swelling

before him, like Columbus and his crew

imagined Leviathan, "whose mere sight

is overpowering", who "looked down on all

that is haughty." But wasn't it pride, greed --

those sins we've forgotten, for they remind us

of what we could have become instead of what

we've settle for -- that extended our reach,

like the virus with its crown of spikes,

around the waist of the world to the polar









POEM "ARCHIPELAGOS" BY GEOFFREY PHILP continued



ice caps, melting into the ocean that's rising

one inch every three years in Miami,

where leatherbacks lumber out of the water

to lay their eggs as carefully as I swaddle

my grandniece in a blanket, scenes my daughter

remembers in the same breath with the bumper

sticker on the first car I owned, "Save the Whales",

the protests where we marched before she could walk,

the war she inherited along with my grandmother's

hair -- that simple country girl from St. James,

home to Sam Sharpe and the Maroons who fought

redcoats, whose bayonets were stained with the blood

of Africans kidnapped from huts under the growl

of the harmattan's sweep over the Sahara

to the rim of the Cape Verde Islands, garlanded

by trade winds that complete the circle and begin

a new alphabet of catastrophe -- hurricanes that stagger

like a betrayed lover barrelling through the islands

until its rage is spent on the sands of our beaches

littered with masks and plastic bottles.


SOURCE: Archipelagos, poetry collection by Geoffrey Philp, published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd, UK, 2023 (pp. 15-16).