AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "THE ORBIS SPIKE, 1610" BY TRINIDADIAN POET JENNIFER RAHIM



JENNIFER RAHIM (1963-2023) was an award-winning Trinidadian poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. She held a BA (1987) and PhD (1993) in English Literature, and an MA in Theology (2016). After joining the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in 1997 as a lecturer in the Department of Liberal Arts, she went on to teach a range of courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including creative writing, literary criticism, and feminist theory. She died unexpectedly in March 2023 in her Island home of Trinidad, leaving behind a substantial body of published work.


Rahim’s six books of poetry include:

• Sanctuaries of Invention (2021)

• Ground Level (2014)

• Redemption Rain (2011)

• Approaching Sabbaths (2009), awarded the 2010 Casa de las Américas Prize

• Between the Fence and the Forest (1999)

• Mothers Are Not the Only Linguists (1992), won the Writers Union of Trinidad & Tobago Writer of the Year Award


Rahim’s poems have appeared in several Caribbean and international journals and anthologies, such as The Caribbean Writer, Small Axe, The Trinidad and Tobago Review, The Graham House Review, The Sisters of Caliban, Crab Orchard Review, and Atlanta Review.


In addition to the previously mentioned awards, Rahim’s other awards include:

• The New Voices Award of Merit (1993) for outstanding contributions to the New Voices journal

• The Gulf Insurance Writers Scholarship (1996) to attend the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute, University of Miami

• The OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature (2018) for her novel Curfew Chronicles.


The revisions of the manuscript of her final novel, Goodbye Bay, was published posthumously by Peepal Tree Press (UK) in July 2023. Her collected poems, containing a substantial amount of recent work, is scheduled for publication in 2024.


See Author's Page at Peepal Tree Press.



THE ORBIS SPIKE, 1610 BY TRINIDADIAN POET JENNIFER RAHIM



Rock, ice and sediment tell

their own stories.

They keep this memory

in 1610, CO2 levels dipped --

an Orbis Spike marks the martyred

on fields emptied of trees, emptied

of the dead that could no more labour.

Breathing hectares and

breathing lungs - limbs of bark and limbs

of flesh. No more alive.

Some tell that living wreaths sprung

upon the un-grieved

to cover, as love will, a vast

and crude nakedness,

and shamanic leaves sucked away

that sick era's poison

like unsolicited forgiveness.

Air was breath again, but never-ever the same.

An infinite absence remains.


Now, uncaring, we strip ourselves

and call that development.

Forests burn like cancerous lungs

and First Nations are still

the first to die.



THE ORBIS SPIKE, 1610 continued



Ancients say, the land breathes for us,

and we for the land.


Today, I plant a poem.

I put its roots down in soil

brown as cosmic dust.

With every you encircled in every cell,

I ask for a multiplication of leaves --

and for First-Garden breeze.


Dear Earth,

we have grown so apart.

Now that we are full-blown, obscenely

anthropocene, will you forgive, allow us, again,

to breathe. . .



SOURCE: Sanctuaries of Invention: Poems by Jennifer Rahim, Peepal Tree Press, Leeds, UK, 2021, pp. 12-13.