Just one from Raymond Antrobus‘s incredible collection The Perseverance and its pages of astonishing poems on family, language, grief, inheritance, sound, silence, his identity as a deaf British Jamaican man, and so much more.
“Dementia”
‘black with widening amnesia’
Derek Walcott
When his sleeping face
was a scrunched tissue,
wet with babbling,
you came, unravelling a joy,
making him euphoric, dribbling
from his mouth–
you simplified a complicated man,
swallowed his past
until your breath was
warm as Caribbean
concrete–
O tender syndrome
steady in his greying eyes,
fading song
in his grand dancehall,
if you must,
do your gentle magic,
but make me unafraid
of what is
disappearing.
live in the layers 