Going home

By: aromaproductions on 12:32 PM

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Going home to the Virgin Islands is always a great pleasure. Since I have lived outside the United States for over thirty plus years, I always look forward to meeting old classmates from high school and university.  I am more in touch with  friends whom I attended university with. A few are writers and I am closely attached to them because we share a common love for the word.

The Virgin Islands which are located near Puerto Rico, consist of 50 islands, most of which belong to the United Kingdom. The U.S. Virgin Islands where I come consists of three large islands (St. Croix, St. Thomas, and St. John), and other smaller islands. The population is about 100.000 scattered among the islands.  I come from St. Thomas, the middle-sized island of the three.  The U.S. Virgin Islands were once Danish.  The U.S. bought the islands from Denmark in 1917. Virgin Islanders had to go through a transition period before they became U.S. citizens.  We do not yet have the right to vote because we are only a U.S. territory, like Guam. 

When I go home I often visit the beach with my dad who is 94 and my older sister.  We go about three times a week.  It is only a ten minute drive from my sister's house. It is even more exciting when my younger sister, who lives in California, visits. Our favorite beach is Coke Point.

The Last Island Griot

Come sunshine, Miss Lizze,

tiny, dark, shriveling,

is brought down Mango Hill

from her museum-ready, matchbox house,

by the big-bum boy we call Anti-man.*

She's set in a chair

under the shack-shack tree

at that junction where vendors hawk fruit

and old women sell newspapers

to passengers in passing cars.

It must be this place, this tree,

as if her navel string was buried there,

as if she came to the world with it.

She sings, strings tales,

her gesturing, gnarled fingers,

rooting back to histories long forgotten.

Eyes distant,

Lizzie speaks like jumbi talking--

her voice coming and going

in a frequency of its own.

Her chants crack,

disappear into a whisper,

channel the voice of ancestors

 generations removed.

The message shifts time and place,

 loses us in the straying,

she unaware of it.

The village remembers,

Lizze sat there long before the vendors

and their mothers before them,

stuffing snuff between her gum and lips

grinding out ancient tales

in an English laced with African words few recognize.

Few take time to listen,

learn about themselves.

Most believe Lizzie's "bazzidy,"

her tales are of backward times,

most believe her tales are nonsense.

 *Anti-man =  a man with feminine qualities or manerism             

*bazzidy =  confused                  *Jumbi = spirit of the dead   

* Griot =  (Of West African origin)  storyteller, singer, musician, and oral historian. The griot kept anunwritten record of all births, marriages, and deaths that was passed down from one generation to the next.

Althea Romeo-Mark 2008

My Island Man

Reggae music's blaring.
I lie bare, toasting.
Sun's rays sweep across
my darkening breasts,
brush my hair, nibble my ears,
play hide and seek with my nose,
dance on my simmering lips.

Shaded eyes net a brown man
strutting on the hot white sand.
His biceps bulge, shoulders swing,
brown thighs gyrate to a ragga beat on the radio.

I want to eat him like a mango,
lick his skin, peel it,
smell it's scent, suck the juice
that is its strength, savor every fiber,
steal his spirit, become Sukannah*
I fly off on a high, island man captured
in thought.

Waking at sunset,
a large mango seed
on my bosom is sucked dry,
fiber, yellow straw.

* Sukannah is a spirit in the Caribbean which is disguised as a human during the day.  At night it has the power to shed its skin and fly from house to house to suck the blood of its victims.  It can be captured if its skin if found and salted. After the skin shrinks, the spirit cannot fit into it again.   Caribbean mythology.