IV - Cricket

The bus groans around the corner like the passengers aboard it,
the ball’s thud against the wicket darts through the radio like the 
exhalations of dry coconuts slamming the ground underneath them.

Batman tjè is my people’s killer and saviour when the team juggles
our souls with their bats at CPL. The bus crests up the hill now,
boring through the first tunnel, the “save the children” graffiti 
on the walls flash beneath the floodlights like the frightening
admonitions of prophets and angels - 

Oh shate, man, them fellers en ready yet -
the rum-loosened mouth of a baggy-faced man,
leaning too confidently on the door, removes my
ears from the live scores - 

Shut up there, useless, what you know? The rum alone
you know, but the rum doe even know you back! - 
her words slice like the aimed cutlass, flimsy like a banana stalk
weary in this hurricane season, she is in the pink twilight
of her life: white hair, eyes blued with time, skin wrung dry 
like the man’s clothes -

Catherine, you know I used to play the best cricket? 
Better than anybody else you know? But who am I?

Out the window, 
Cul De Sac Bay devours me with its stark clarity: 
that sand, where red-breasted men bled like spliced mangoes, 
is eaten by waves pregnant with history,
washed with terrible memory and spat back out. 

Who is that man?

In them banana days, 
your bat was cutlass, your wicket was the wéjim, 
and is just cut that, no sportsmanship,  no long talk, 
is just cut it and sell it and buy a bread if you can. 

He hides a greater depth than his mud-tested clothes allow, like river basen, its mirkiness, unassuming bottom, 
can drown the life from the best of swimmers.

My batman tjè is less for the cricketers who are
but those who could have been.