AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "WHO MADE ME A STRANGER IN MY WORLD?" BY SAINT LUCIAN POET JOHN ROBERT LEE



JOHN ROBERT LEE, a poet, preacher, and retired teacher and librarian, was born in 1948 in the Caribbean Island nation of Saint Lucia. In 1969, he enrolled in the arts degree program at the University of the West Indies (UWI) at Cave Hill, Barbados, where he studied English and French Literature, including Caribbean Literature. He put his academic studies on hold to participate in theatrical and other literary pursuits exploding across the Caribbean during the 1970s. He completed his degree program at the UWI Mona campus in Jamaica in the early 1980s.


Lee is the author of four collections of poetry:

• Elemental: New and Selected Poems (2008)

• Collected Poems 1975-2015 (2017)

• Pierrot (2020), and

• Belmont Portfolio (2023)


His poems are included in several international anthologies and periodicals, including The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Poetry Wales, Small Axe, and The Missing Slate. He edited Roseau Valley and Other Poems (2003), a Saint Lucian anthology of poetry and art spanning fifty years. Together with poet Kendel Hippolyte, he compiled and edited Saint Lucian Literature and Theatre: An Anthology of Reviews (2006). For many years, he also produced and presented radio and television programs in Saint Lucia.


Lee has received the Saint Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold) for his contribution to the development of Saint Lucian arts and culture.


Ordained as an Elder of Calvary Baptist Church in 1997, Elder Lee does not preach as much as he once did but teaches the Adult Sunday School Class at his Community Baptist Church. Father of three children, he lives with his wife in Saint Lucia.


Check out the Poet's Facebook Author Page

Photo Credit: Marion Nelson and Allen Sherman / Caribbean Life



POEM "WHO MADE ME A STRANGER IN MY WORLD?" BY JOHN ROBERT LEE



Who made me a stranger in my world?

Who determined I was a minority?

Who made my skin a boundary and barrier


to negotiate at immigration counters?

Who are the traffickers and traders

of bodies and souls and sex of the inheritors of the earth?


Who are the invaders of unfenced gardens

honest kitchens, sacred grounds?

Who are the thieves of our acres, our wide rivers,


the surf-edged coasts of our children and old women?

Whose guns, burning crosses and mitred corruptions

lynched and raped and decimated nations and continents


of citizens - not minorities, not niggers, not coolies -

of this denuding blue-green planet angling around our sun?

Whose recurring post-truth narrative, recycling apartheid


red-neck latitudes of fenced plantations

and other such discriminations

we citizens - no resident aliens - reject and bloodfire?


Whose fingerprints are on every coup d’état,

regime-change manipulations,

behind caravans of refugees, over tent-cities,


on bleeding children in the streets of Herat,

rubble cities of Syria, atrocities in Sudan

charity scams and child abuse in Haiti?


And what of Trayvon, Charleston Church, the boy Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland,

Botham Jean in Texas, Jamal Kashoggi, all those neighbourhood assassinations?

You think I stretch the inventory too far, am mixing murders and metaphors,


don't know the histories

am disregarding tribal warfares, who sold who,

crusades, ancestral hatreds?


Costumes and masquerades evolve

but who are Babylon, Egypt and Rome today?

Who threatens and invades?


Who buys and sells house-slave leaders,

infiltrates democracies

interferes with elections?











POEM "WHO MADE ME A STRANGER IN MY WORLD?" BY JOHN ROBERT LEE continued



Who spies and kills with drones

lies as a matter of policy,

hacks your private conversations?


Who arrogantly calls themselves super-powers,

whose lackeys insult you in the visa office,

whose police and soldiers shoot citizens with impunity?


David Hinds, roots-man of Steel Pulse, chanting them down

"snakes in the grass, they know not God,

politricksters...is dey are the same man."


My 92 year-old friend the songwriter

never forgot British headmaster Fox-Hawes

in the arena of a classroom


caning Bastien with 12 strokes

for burning the blackbook of detentions,

and Bastien never spoke.


Bravo Bastien, bravo citizen!

Bravo Rosa Parks, Mandela, Marley,

Toussaint L'Ouverture, Tiananmen Square tank-confronter,


Palestinian sling-shot warriors, Malala Yousafzai,

Liu Xiaobo, Mahatma Gandhi, Marcus Garvey

and all those who in the belly of the beasts


walk with disenfranchised coalitions,

raising blood-stained placards, berth-rights,

rainbow passports of citizenship,


claiming their place at the table,

their seat on the bus,

their desk in the school,


their home in the tree-lined avenue,

their voice in the senate,

their right to stroll in the park,


to wear their hair as they please,

without being raped,

without being shot in the back,


to check into any hotel,

to drive the car of their choice,

to love, to live.


SOURCE: Pierrot, poetry collection by John Robert Lee, published by Peepal Tree Press Ltd, UK, 2020 (pp. 64-67).