Poems

Hanover murders

I tiptoed my rage thorough a raindrops of emotions like a healer,

Trying to mend with strangled outcries -

Hanover rocks, and dreams are counted among the dead -

Morning rising over Hanover,

And the world takes pictures of our sorrow -

Charred bones and skulls and melted flesh

Feeding the news and the Internet.

Jamaica rocks,

Rocks, not to the rhythms of a bubbling mass

But to the pains of feet that slowly tap, tap.

It's a graveyard rock, rock,

Where loud explosions break the night

And mournful wailing on the rock .

I tiptoed my outcry into an air

Pregnant with fears and soundless agony,

Where tension's mounting Speechless twitches

And whispers holding vigil.

- Homer Sylvester

Concrete rose

With outstretched arms and longing eyes

He looked out into the distance

But the world was blind to him

He was a child scorned

A menace to society

A sufferer lacking any commendable quality

Maggots filled his open sores

His face was blackened by soot

His eyes told the story of a sage deep in wonder

He commanded a ghastly air of precocity

With the constant torment of flies embedded in his reality

He is our child

The future of the nation

His small heart is the shelter for gigantic dreams

His tears signals the need for love, care and appreciation

With just the right opportunity

He could write lines like Marcus Garvey

Or lead great nations like His Majesty Haile Selassie

He is God's greatest gift to mankind

Though shaped by daily condescension

He can rise above any situation

This forgotten child of the nation.

- Sandrene Jackson

In our best interest

Take it as it is.

What can we change?

But ourselves?

But to do the best for our children

really none of us asked to be Here, but by being here

We trust that the powers that be

Destined this passage in our best interest

Having a strong sense of reality

We loved a man once

dearly

Until he "gut" out de house

put ah gun at yuh head

HISTORY is put in perspective

"Better the ending than the beginning ..."

So silence, distrust, are not forms of malice

But a lesson well taught, the Ugly face of apartheid,

Haitian revolution unqualified, Learn the history of others

They don't take us seriously, They know of our cruelty to our own

Children barred from sitting Examinations, ruled against to a Place in

Our own universities,

Flagrant disrespect for the International convention of the Rights of the child

We are not even dynamic Enough to scam a programme to Just get their money

100 million is too little to go after

So the courts are overcrowded With limited personnel to try

We pat our backs about those Who "made" in unconcerned about expansion

To house the homeless

What will they who "made it" do?

They will meet after "graduation" an ungovernable system

And one in which they probably Will not achieve "employment"

They can't migrate nor will be "migrateable"

A Goliath of a problem! no wonder "it" suggested a cell

- Helen-Ann E. Wilkinson