The Healing Next Time E-Book

Roy McFarlane

• Herausgeber: Nine Arches Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 60

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Roy McFarlane's second poetry collection, The Healing Next Time, is a timely and unparalleled book of interwoven sequences on institutional racism, deaths in custody and of a life story set against the ever-changing backdrop of Birmingham at the turn of the millennium. Here forms a potent and resolute narrative in lyrical and multidimensional poems which refuse to look the other way or accept the whitewashed version of events. Courageous, rageful and mournful, these are poems of Black history and Black presence, poems of witness and poems of activism. McFarlane's intricate lines make record of injustice and mark the names of those who have lost their lives and dignity to prejudice and hatred. The Healing Next Time also asks vital questions of the future, and of the reader – and reminds us where the power to change things lies. It is also a poetry of personal discovery, of revelation and resilience – where the influence of Jazz and of James Baldwin infuse and shape this unique, remarkable book.

Leseprobe

The Healing Next Time

The Healing Next Time

Roy McFarlane

ISBN: 978-1911027454

ePub ISBN: 9781911027638

Copyright © Roy McFarlane

Cover artwork: Untitled 2006, (mixed media on digital image, 81 x 106cm) Copyright © Barbara Walker. Website: www.barbarawalker.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Roy McFarlane has asserted his rights under Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

First published October 2018 by:

Nine Arches Press

Unit 14, Sir Frank Whittle Business Centre

Great Central Way

Rugby

CV21 3XH

United Kingdom

www.ninearchespress.com

Printed in the United Kingdom by:

Imprint Digital

To Maish

To love and be loved in return

Contents

New Millennium Journal

1999 – Parts of a broken man

2000 – There are no gods in the midnight hour

2001 – When the devil comes calling…

2002 – What we do when things fall apart

2003 – And who will wipe away our tears

2004 – When the ground shakes

2005 – Every second counts

2006 – New wine in broken vessels

… they killed them

David Oluwale, 1969

Blair Peach, 1979

Clinton McCurbin, 1987

Orville Blackwood, 1991

Joy Gardner, 1993

Shiji Lapite, 1994

Brian Douglas, 1995

David Bennett, 1998

Roger Sylvester, 1999

Jean Charles de Menezes, 2005

Azelle Rodney, 2005

Sean Rigg, 2008

Ian Tomlinson, 2009

Olaseni Lewis, 2010

Cherry Groce, 2011

Mark Duggan, 2011

Dalian Atkinson, 2016

Rashan Charles, 2017

Gospel According to Rasta

In the city of a hundred tongues

Solomon’s love song

Gods looking just like me

No woman, no cry

Writings in the sky

Conversation

Dancing with Ghosts

Their hands

Arms outstretched

A British thing to do

Gabay of hope

Liberty

The beginning of love

Notes

Thanks and Acknowledgements

About the author & this book

God gave Noah the Rainbow sign, no more water but the fire next time.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

New Millennium Journal

Addressing our individual and collective suffering, we will find ways to heal and recover that can be sustained, that can endure from generation to generation.

bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

1999 – Parts of a broken man

the more a man has the more a man wants

—Paul Muldoon

i.

On Sunday, the preacher’s speaking of revelation and repentance,

the end of the world is on the lips of news reporters.

Cults are spreading and in the basement of a computer department

they’re preparing for the invasion of the millennium bug—

we watch for the skies and miss the stones at our feet.

*

The family man is shooting a basketball, graceful

in motion and everybody’s watching the flight of the ball

reaching its zenith, then beginning to fall. All things fall;

summer rain, falling from grace, the fallout

of a sordid affair; the ball’s falling.

*

Breadfruit, soursap, plantain. A Saturday morning ritual,

roles changed, the son takes his mother to a Caribbean stall

in Bilston market. She’s not as strong as she used to be,

her breathing laboured, but she snaps the heads, digs out the eyes,

yellow yam, sweet potato, dasheen.

*

A daughter will be born soon, an olive branch

for the family man treading water after storms ceased.

ii.

A nation hears no evil, sees no evil, speaks no evil. A son’s blood,

a father’s sweat and mother’s tears will lead a retired judge

and three diverse men to inquire in towns and cities

of the racism that kills. And the rocks will hear and rivers speak

of the death of Stephen Lawrence.

*

After hearing of the death of Grover Washington Jr,

the family man’s falling asleep with his Walkman headphones;

between winelight and come morning, memories are awakened,

whirl of cassette tapes beginning the rewind of illicit love:

just the two of us building castles in the sky.

*

Late meeting, lips kissing, hands feeling, fingers…

Her halter-neck top has been drawn over her head,

the night air touching her breasts, powdered

with a flurry of goosebumps, he’s sucking greedily

and it all begins again.

*

A mother’s sharing roast breadfruit, ackee and saltfish,

with a warning:               please, set your house in order.

iii.

There are no purple skies but the prophet Prince lives

to see his words come alive, as people party like it’s 1999.

We could die any day. James Byrd Jr died the year before;

lynching-by-dragging, hate driving for miles in a pick-up-truck,

driving from century to century.

*

He’s speaking at public inquiries, tongue heavy with injustice,

teeth grinding to the sound of another death in custody.

There’s a bitter taste, he needs something sweet; later in a private place

her labia moistened by his tongue, she guides his erection deep

and voices are lost in each other’s mouths.

*

He’s singing gospels, praying repentance into the early morning,

following traditions from sunny islands, avoiding the tears

of his wife, who’s dreaming of impending sorrows. The millennium arrived

drunk with Hogmanay, midnight mass, Kwanzaa blessings

and Prince alighted from the heavens in a purple robe.

*

A new job, but the more a man has the more a man wants.

He leaves doors unclosed, doors that ache in the wind.

2000 – There are no gods in the midnight hour

i.

2,000 doves of peace released into the new millennium, holy doors opened,

a Pope in purple uncovers the sins of the Church, kneeling in mea culpa,

praying for forgiveness by the beating of his breast; it takes three priests

to open the doors of St Paul’s, so many doors to open, how many more

to begin a healing?

*

An out-of-town preacher draws a crowd and the family man’s watching

the fire and brimstone bubbling in the orator’s veins, the sweet by and by

sweating through his pores, as he looks them in the eye with hands raised high.

They’re all running to the altar, clothed in guilt, hoping for healing and saving

by touching the hem of his Armani.

*

A mother’s hands are over-ripened and seeping with eczema,

each finger bruised and darkened. The son takes cream and rubs

her hands; hands that worked hard, hands that scolded him

when needed, hands that took a hold of Jesus’ hands, hands full of sweet love.

Now he’s massaging her weary hands.

*

There are no gods in the midnight hour,

only porn and replays of Janet Jackson.

ii.

Anytime, anyplace, in a car Janet’s voice tied them with the Velvet Rope

album cover on the front seat, CD playing, files and paperwork on the floor.

Secret lovers accustomed to the shape of each other, the folding, morphing

in confined spaces, the tightness, urgency. Janet duets with this affair,

whispering; I want you now, I don’t want to stop.

*

The family man misses out on the Highland pipers and African drummers

at the funeral of Bernie Grant, a firebrand burning in the House of Commons;

the media tried to put out his flame after the night of fires when cities

became beacons of insurrections. Broadwater Farm rises