FOR ME – THE BACKYARD
Play your carnival, play your masque, Dance with your Country Club set, Hey, jump at your midnight fete:
For these things I’ll never ask –
Take them all and leave for me
The back-yard scene at dusk:
The haze of blue wood-smoke, Morning mist among mango leaves And the nancy-story fantasies
That the cries of kiskadees
From long, long ago evoke.
Keep your calypsos and your steel-bands! Wiggle your hips and waggle your hands!
For me the good soft tingling dew
And mottled shadows beneath a guava tree, The glimmer, the dim mysterious hue, Of coconut fronds spider hands
Immobile, immeshed in the filigree,
The plaited pattern, of sarapple and plum, Breadfruit and mango – and the perpetual hum Of all the insects hidden in jumbie-lands:
The magic a waning moon can weave; set free.
Let the saxaphones quark and wail!
And pianos thump a jiving jumbled tale! For me the ruby warmth in sunshine,
The haphazard tracery of this wild vine, Coconuts a-sizzling,
Water vapour in the air,
A rerd cock crowing, the clatter of a pail, The swift white drift
Of clouds in the cool trade wind,
A whiff of rice and salt-fish cooking
And of earth, dark, dank and bare.
Keep your serge suit, collar and tie! Asparagus, lentils, your high-falutin apple pie! Keep your respectability; I don’t care!
For me the sun, the dew, the leaves, the wind – And why should I even spurn
These little ragged clumps of fern
And the rickety latrine standing near
The old grey-trunked tamarind!
Assuredly for me – the naïve back-yard
Where bajak ants, without hypocrisy, troop by And no gentlemen politely smile and lie.