We Never Went Hungry
We never went hungry
Well, that was never our history
Our history
was of revolution
We never went hungry
We never
suffered destitution
That was never our his tory
Our history was
a revolution
That is why my grandfather
persisted with his toy
To root that sheen and cassava
to peel the great air of its leaf
The sea -green banana
with its temporal trunk
was to be cut an d flung
to the mud
And although there was no
discernible scheme,
at least not to us, perhaps the old man
Was compelled to plant those
trees along roots
embedded in the maps
of his palms
Because history had tied him to the land,
and he could never break free
We never went hungry
We never suffered destitution
That was never our history
Our history
was a revolution
We never went hungry
We never suffered
destitution
This was his heritage
He knew each bean crop
or ripple of these
The purple sugar of the cane
Planted not for sugar
but because it had always
The parakeets,
the river near that little house
Which nevertheless sage
or gully -birst would
Stood hurricanes and blows
The frissonak hen and the mancock to kill
The drake that caws,
the eucolic and the echelon
So that even in suburbs
far from mountain towns or farms
He would cultivate a homestead and orchid
He would irrigate the small ravine
Spit down from the wash -mouth sink
in the cold water room
The soil that's healed his hands
Glending into the sweet mud of his sweat
One day the sun might be shining,
the rain might be falling same time
The devil and his wife
might be fighting for a ham bone
And that bush was broad, remember?
The veritable gust of light
A vision, a view of hill
s and herbs besides
Miss Henry was in her veranda
shelling peas and watching
An d at some point the
seed pod burst
and Drew the limit of air
And this is what we had
And we worked with it
We were given a small holding
We were thrown the husk
But there was something in the way
the lights splashed against the side of
the house on Sunday afternoon
There was something in that light
Revolution
Never was perfect
Ever since the last re
volution
Revolution, revolution
you