TO THE BLACKENED FIELD

Tracey McEvoy

So, you shipped out

in all your brown glory

fresh from the Trini hills.

Chinee mother and Creole father,

roots in the high plains of Africa

and the lowlands of Scotland.

Born of owners and slaves, locked

in the mesh of money and sex.

 

In you – in me – is the blood

of three continents. I’m told I pass.

As if it’s a test. As if it’s not

good enough to prize the

blackness in me. Troubling,

to sing from the seat of privilege,

when what’s inside still aches

to be free.

           

I fixate on who came before,

their wretched journeys across

land and sea, the horrors endured

on ships named Fortitude

or Charming Betty.

 

Centuries clawing at the rock,

genes pooled, we kept evolving.

Pulses beating with hybrid vigour.

No time to stop, for the future lies

ahead, just over the next hill.

And all the time, the blood

seeped into the earth,

bringing us home.

 

I’ll winter here, then go

heart in hand, to where

the bones are dug deep.

And there I will look

to the blackened field

of burning cane where

one ancestor raised the whip to another,

and listen

as the fire spits sugar.

Tracey McEvoy is a writer and poet, living on the south coast of England. She has a Master’s in Creative Writing from Kent University and is completing a poetry collection about her family’s relocation from London to Georgetown, Guyana in the 1970s. Titled Threshold, the poems explore the dislocation of crossing continents at a transitional age and contemplate identity as it bridges different worlds.