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| Cyril Dabydeen |
Spilt Dreams
Everything requires for its existence its own
opposite,
or else it fades into nothingness.
--Carl Jung
1
Almost
languorous you tell me
about
dreams you’ve been having,
grown-up
as you are.
The
same dream over and over,
what
you remember most—
two faces, two heads.
And one
talking on the phone
with
the other, unheard voices,
like a
mute tongue’s rasp.
2
Your
mother now asking
Am I
becoming Caucasian?
Who’s
turning black? Not white!
A
dating scene, images compelling
as life
mustn’t pass us by,
I let
you know.
A
refrain, like doing a makeover--
Michael
Jackson dancing
to “Victory,”
believe me.
3
A
moonwalk I tell my daughter,
about
the man in the mirror
wanting
to become a fashion model
making
faces when you’re asleep
as I listen to you like no other,
solid
dreams coming my way.
Loveless
The man
who’s loveless desires an old pain--
mediocrity
lies in what he will say next
close
to a trinity-peaked mountain
where a
hummingbird flaps its wings
being
never at rest as he considers himself
only in
an island & travelling again
to
other places like Florida, then to
Louisiana,
boundaries bringing us closer--
where
we haven’t been before, but
wanting
to be in one place only as
his
lyrics are like a dreamful song, if only
in
America where all things are best,
he
tells me, but now here in Canada
where
he will make his mark though
people
are sometimes prickly at best,
with
one territory only in his mind--
the
landscape reshaping itself as I
contemplate
it the more he talks about
himself
& looking up at the mountains
because
of where he will live longest.
Distancing
Like wasted prodigals,
happy to be home again.
-Will Durant
With new shirt on--
not bedraggled-looking
but come from America
with a stranger’s
smile
unlike his parting ways.
Being back in the village
he has bolstered a nerve
to say who he isn’t anymore,
nothing of past
years as
he
longs for perfection
Murmuring to himself
about wanting to
remain
in one
place only all his life
in his individual
style
being a stranger always.
Cyril Dabydeen is “a noted Canadian poet” (House of Commons, Ottawa). Recent books of fiction are Forgotten Exiles and My Undiscovered Country. Previous titles include: God’s Spider, My Multi-Ethnic Friends, Jogging in Havana, Black Jesus and Other Stories, My Brahmin Days, North of the Equator, and Imaginary Origins: Selected Poems (Peepal Tree Press, UK). His novel, Drums of My Flesh (Mawenzie House), is an IMPAC/Dublin Prize nominee and Guyana Prize winner. Cyril’s work has appeared in the Oxford, Penguin, and Heinemann anthologies, and in Poetry (Chicago), The Critical Quarterly (UK), Prairie Schooner (US), The Fiddlehead, Prism International, and Canadian Literature, etc. Ottawa Poet Laureate Emeritus, he taught Writing at the University of Ottawa.
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