AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


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POEM "THE ABORTIONIST'S DAUGHTER DECLARES HER LOVE" BY TRINIDADIAN POET SHIVANEE RAMLOCHAN



SHIVANEE RAMLOCHAN is a Trinidadian poet, arts reporter and book blogger. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine. Shivanee also writes about books for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the Anglophone Caribbean's largest literary festival, as well as Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago's oldest independent Caribbean specialty bookseller. She is the deputy editor of The Caribbean Review of Books. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, published by Peepal Tree Press in October 2017, was shortlisted for the 2018 Felix Dennis Award for best first collection and a 2018 Forward Prize for Poetry.










Photo of Shivanee Ramlochan by Marlon James featured on the poet's official website at https://shivaneeramlochan.com/



THE ABORTIONIST'S DAUGHTER DECLARES HER LOVE BY SHIVANEE RAMLOCHAN



Here is the church. These are the doors that open to the sea.

My grandmother once knelt here, awed, a special guest to an exorcism.


It is nothing like the movies would have you think,

she told me, and I believed her.


They have called me many things between these aisles,

she told me, and I believed her.


That is the trouble with our trade, she said.

When men aspire to terrible jobs, we offer them hushed respect,

the blushing necks of virgins.

Women wearing the same gloves, sorting the same straight-backed pins

between the prayers of their teeth,

are taught to deserve nothing more than an acreage of sorrow.


Why an acreage?

Never give a woman more sadness than she needs.

From this fabric, from this persistent earth, she will wrangle

greater things than men can fathom.

She will wrestle squalling tar infants from the mire, and those children

shall stumble upwards, slicing through the spines of men

who have offended their mothers.





THE ABORTIONIST'S DAUGHTER DECLARES HER LOVE continued



Give a woman an acreage of humiliation, with one spade,

one crucifix, one box of straight-backed pins.

You've given her nothing she can grow.

Within the year she will run up hard against the borders of her land,

shrieking, scouring the air for a way to flee her sex.


Give her enough land to hang herself.


Here is the church. It lies close to the land that they gave us.

Come see the land of my grandmother, and her mother, and hers.

Come walk on the borders of my mother's land, where no trees grow.



SOURCE: Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, poetry collection by Shivanee Ramlochan, Peepal Tree Press, Leeds, UK, 2017.