Meeting Ground – Christmas 2022

The four poems below, one from a Belizean who is a university student in Jamaica, one from a Jamaican university student, one from a Jamaican in the US, and the other from the Poet Laureate of Jamaica, have different elements of Christmas we can identify with – the miraculous birth or manger scene, Christmas homecoming, and family gatherings around seasonal gastronomic delicacies. In the true spirit of the poet, though, we see more below and between the lines.

Hoping that we keep the less fortunate in mind for Christmas and are kinder to each other in the New Year. – Ann-Margaret Lim, coordinator, Meeting Ground

Look Down Where Mary Lays

Away in a manger, a girl screams.

The composed Madonna effaced by tears.

Now a mature fifteen

she was given, at twelve, to a saint

who kept her pristine for God.

Favoured by Him

yet bowing to the decree of Eve’s curse,

she is jewelled in ruby blotches,

capillaries bursting under pressure

and adorned in silver sweat.

With one last convulsion, a son

is born; graced with gifts —

gold, frankincense, myrrh

a ternary of kingship; of worship

death, mourning.

They will sing his praises

for two thousand years,

because he lives.

But she — that girl, away in a manger

giving birth, who died at forty-one

got nothing.

Blaire Santos

From Belize

Second-year student at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona

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The Exile Flies Home to Trout Hall, Jamaica

[Christmas 2018]

I fly down and hop off a country

bus to stand on the bridge, under

which I was baptised at nine, trying

to interpret the sunny language of the river

of voices in the air above the

water-hugged rocks and heat-ripened

breasts of women who look up, hurling

stony insults my way. So I cross,

follow a yellow butterfly into the sunny heart

of town, where the colourful

wooden shop fronts are littered with the idle voices

of half-naked men, leering at school girls in baby

blue uniforms, while their wives labour in the surrounding

Ugli fields of Mr. Sharke, the good Englishman,

who built and named this town of no trouts, Trout Hall,

who once a year deploys his planes

to spray his neighbours and green alligator-skinned

Uglies, hybrid child of the orange, grapefruit

and tangerine. Everybody knows his slogan: “The Affliction

is only skin deep, the beauty is in the eating.” Over

the cardboard church even the pigeons sound gospel

and I am moved by brooks as brooding

as the Bible; traffic flows the wrong way

and the English missionaries’ sun-blocking peach

Baptist church is still empty, except for the cows

chewing mouthfuls of shadowy grass and the cricketers crying, “Out”

as wheezing, rust-colored cars line up to cross the pocked face

of the palm-sheltered bridge. A divine

wind blows out the sun as I slip into a crowded

bar and down Red Stripes until I forget

who I am and announce to God that I am

trying to write a fiction greater than God,

a poetry to define our world.

Rayon Lennon

Jamaican living in the US

Poem from: Barrel Children

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Salt and Shake

The sounds from my great-grandmother’s kitchen:

the crash and clang of pots, her children all too grown

to be watched by the others, too grown to still be all squashed

in her kitchen, huddled over the stove, waiting for boiling pots.

Their children are outside with the coal stove, and bitter words

dropping in time to the dull knife beating on the cut board.

All this family beef, like, who only brings wine, or

who only makes vegetables for the holidays;

or is always in pain or too sick to help in the kitchen

and still the brother trying hard to make it all fit in the pot.

The sound and struggle waft upstairs to their children—

a too young generation to even think of cooking,

too caught up with playing, to wonder if one day they’ll be

fighting instead, wrapped up in the Christmas country air

complaining at dinner that the food is too fresh

but my great-grandmother says

child, things like this are nut’n likkle salt cyaa fix.

Jayda Pitter

From Jamaica

Second-year UWI, Mona student

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Christmas Pudding

I didn’t have a child’s heart, I swear. Each year

as Christmas drew near I drew further into myself

wanting to creep into the huge old ceramic jar

on the shelf and drown in the aroma of pimento

and cloves and dried fruit marinating in rum.

Wishing Christmas would never come.

But Christmas came alright and the one part I liked

was the making of Christmas pudding.

It started on the day they took that jar from the shelf,

bustled around to fire up the Calidona Dover

wood-burning stove, grease the cake tins

rub up the sugar and butter in the mixing bowls

throw the sifted flour and the beaten eggs

and the orange peel and the candied citron

and the rose water and vanilla essence and

the whole jar of drunken fruit in.

The pudding couldn’t wait for the date, the 25th,

O no, the cooks wouldn’t hear of it. Christmas

puddings have to be baked or steamed at least two

weeks before the event. Then, quietly sitting

in their tins, soaked again in good overproof rum.

THAT’S THE LAW. At least of pudding-shaped

cooks who would never go around arresting drunken

men for imbibing too much of their Christmas pudding.

O no. Not content with that alcoholic haze, on the day

they add brandy to the pudding and set lights to it. I swear!

And I know swearing is a bad habit. But it’s not

my fault. It came from lifting the lid of that old

crock and inhaling even before the cooks got hold of

that rum-soaked fruit each year and drowned it.

Olive Senior

Poet Laureate of Jamaica

Poem from: Hurricane Watch; New and Collected Poems