AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "THE DAY OF REVOLUTION" BY GUYANESE POET MAHADAI DAS



MAHADAI DAS, a poet and teacher, was born in Eccles, East Bank Demerara, Guyana, in 1954. In the early 1970s, she earned her BA at the University of Guyana. After obtaining her MA at Columbia University, New York, she began a doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, Illinois. While there, she became critically ill and never completed the program.


Publications of poetry by Mahadai Das include:

  • I Want to be a Poetess of My People (1977)
  • My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982)
  • Bones (Peepal, 1988) and
  • A Leaf in His Ear: Collected Poems (posthumously released by Peepal, 2010)


Over the last decade of her life, Mahadai Das suffered from debilitating health problems. These curtailed the writing career of one of the Caribbean’s most talented women poets. In April 2003, while in Barbados for medical treatment, she died of a heart attack. She was 48 years old.



Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press Ltd., UK




THE DAY OF REVOLUTION BY MAHADAI DAS



I dreamt that the day of revolution would come

that thousands would storm the city streets

screaming for justice.

Who can hold back the climbing sun in the sky?

Children hate the trapped darkness of the night.

I heard a cry echo the wind...

Soon the crowd advanced and raised

a further cry.

Like full-blown trees

at their maturing, the schools

surrendered their eager fruits. Then

the Bastille storm advanced upon

the scampering rats

like an irrevocable flood,

like an irrevocable coming of dawn.

Ordered to march, the soldiers, my brothers, came

bearing in the stems of their guns, flowers

for the children of freedom's

new regiment.

The counterfeit general, left wingless

in the hostile air, clothed in the tarnished

brooches of his vanity, unprepared

for the sudden speech of freedom,

continued to spin his illusions

with the rotten yarn of his life.

Last night

I dreamed that the day of revolution would come.


SOURCE: Poem from her collection My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982), published in A Leaf in His Ear: Collected Poems (1973-1994) by Mahadai Das, Peepal Tree Press, Leeds, UK, 2010, p. 61.