across from the Park, where three nights ago, passing into morning
the three soldiers, sergeant, corporal and private
bound for Kandahar, Afghanistan and places drawn on maps
beat the brains clean out of the head of a homeless man
asleep in a bag on a cold concrete bench,
and counted the blows delivered with their polished black boots
with tips of steel which turned his statue to red liquid
the colour of blood when the sun rose, too late
for a safer bed, too early for Salvation Army breakfast.
Dead. When this same sun came up and showed him dead,
there was no light, no explanation, no motive
for the sport of blood, dripping down from the cement bench
speckled in red dots with tails attached,
illustrating motion, flight and escape.
THE MORNING cold sun shows only the slow long line,
women with their heads tied in black silk, concealing the length
of hair, the colour of eyes and lips. Robes
in many colours, of blue, and black, maroon, and dark-red,
flow on the brown grass, as mothers push prams and strollers
with infants in them who do not talk, who do not know
the meaning of this tragic silence, who are silent in their safety,
and do not cry or scream for joy as they swing
into the heavens of the blue skies.
WHO DO not cry, for they are dead to the violence of blood
marked by the rubber tires. Dead their mothers
push them to their daily care; and dead in sleep
they arrive: mother and child. In this clockwork obedience
with time and place they greet the baby-sitters drugged
in their own immigrant importance. These mothers push
the stroller and the pram with seldom help from men
who walk beside, on the safe side
from traffic, from mad men, and from policemen.
BUT THESE are obedient men, leaving the women
who mother their children and their tots, to live alone
and feel the full fragrance of the winds blowing cold
from the towers of the Royal Bank and other royal banks,
the towers of the Bank of Nova Scotia, Toronto Dominion,
the Trump Towers invading Toronto, and not a peddling bank
owned by a black man to give easy loans of two hundred
dollars to meet the rent, to meet the parking fine,
to re-establish dignity and manhood; the afternoon
his glee over-flowed thousands of others cheering the same
hope, and same fantasy, “Cahn lose! Cahn lose!
Not in this company! The other horses are donkeys!”
AT WOODBINE, and one minute later, a voice from the heavens
cried, “They’re off!” Sharp and cruel as a sword
of lightning, and like lightning the voice chopped his hope
and his fantasy into smithereens, and all he could see
through the shards and the pieces of glass he mistook for crystals
and precious stones were the towers of banks, with no
dollar signs painted on them, and the yellow-painted recreation
centre, two storeys of ice rinks for men who do not want
to grow older than childhood before the puck is dropped.
They are left now, men in short pants, like boys, to face
the cement and the anger in the architecture of the Armouries,
and walk under the umbrellas of leaves of the Japanese maples,
investigate the slow moving water in the gutter,
hoping water can be made into wine in this Mount of Olives
barrenness, a man in a hurry to board a bus,
or a taxi, throws his burning American red-faced
Marlboros in the gutter, on my neighbour’s lawn.
EARLIER YESTERDAY afternoon, there was a parade
of soldiers and officers, with spit, polish, bugles
and flash, trumpets marking the ceremony, bagpipes
wailing and drums beating in a slow death-march,
making you think there was a funeral, as if they knew
there would be a death.
WHEN THE first blow landed, the sound was muffled, covered,
concealed beneath the blanket of yellowing leaves,
and his marksmanship was like an arrow driven
into the hole made by the previous blow. The blow
caused by his comrade, born in Canada, enlisted to travel
through dust and storm, through plantations of fertile bush
and poppy excellent to inhale, from Afghanistan
to Shuter Street, they say.
THE THIRD companion-witness made a wish
that was a dream that he was not there that night to see
and hear, as witness and fool, that he was still back in the Island,
poor, black and hungry, wishing that luck and a smile
from the immigration officer would land him in the other
prison of Canada’s racialism. “But not there, Y’Onner,
on the Friday night, in the park, when the sergeant
was kicking the man, mistaking the man for a terriss,
and he was behaving like he was in Afghanistan.
I only play baseball only in the park, as I watch the two o’ them
kicking and shouting and calling out ‘strikes’. Stop,
I screamed, stop, as my shouts matched the landing of the black
boots. Stop! Stop, I screamed. Stop.
But my shouts matched the landing boots upon the man’s
chest, in matching rhythm with the landing blows. Stop!”
IT WAS a scream of horror, in a dream, for he was not,
could not be watching the same man he drank Molson’s draught beer
with, man-for-man, Molson’s-for-Molson’s; he was not
in Afghanistan, was not killing Talibans, wasn’t on patrol,
in the midnight blackness matching the colour of his own
skin, in that park, in this city, in this diamond.
IT WAS a nightmare; he was sleeping on a Serta mattress
under the sheets fresh from the washing machine,
up in the suburbs, Scarborough, Don Mills, Mississauga,
in comfort beneath the sheets ironed to perfection.
A dream: had to be, since his presence here in this country
as an immigrant working his way up, rank by rank,
job by job, night watchman, taxi driver, before he knew
the streets, was close to tumbling down.
HIS DREAMS are melting. He is not here in this park,
on this Friday, in this blackness of extinguished lights,
empty except for them, two Canadians and an immigrant;
a man kicked to death; a woman dialling in the darkness
holds her cellular phone to her frightened lips
and whispers into it, “Nine-one-one? Nine-one-one?”
into this black Friday. “Is this Nine-one-one? ... is ...”
THE HEAVENS blacken the immigrant soldier, burdened
by Christianity and hope on earth, and by his burial ground
when he is dead, opened with the glory of warm
sunshine the next day, Saturday, when the swings in the park
were aeroplanes, and Canada geese and seagulls
were the Spitfires and darts attacking the stale bread thrown
by bird-lovers on the hard ground, near the three small mountains
of leaves piled high and rotting near the community kitchen
garden gouged into the black soil mixed
with the rotted vegetables, where sunflowers grow high
as sweat under an immigrant’s arms five-foot-five in height.
WOMEN FROM Somalia dressed all in white, heading to mosques
&nbs
p; and Muslim prayers, their faces covered with masks
of fine white silk and black cotton, walk
on this unhallowed ground splattered with blood and death
and fallen maple leaves, on which there was a murder.
Last night’s murder. And all the other homeless men,
already awake early now in the mild morning wind,
generous to the last man, building a brotherhood,
that talks in whispers, and with their eyes, since last
night’s bloodletting, helping one another to reach
the linoleum on the large table spread for a last supper
of a cuppa coffee already cold, slice of toast
wet from the spread of margarine, limping on sore
feet, to beat the crawling crowd on both sidewalks,
to reach the table of Salvation Army breakfast first.
HERBS, FLOWERS, short trees that bear peas, vines
that hold tomatoes, cucumbers, and the tall faces of sunflower
the colour of fallen leaves in spring and in summer,
are now dead, and this is why there is no memorial
of flowers marking the scene of murder, the killing of a man
nameless before someone dug up his past and found
he was an editor, a man of words, silenced now,
unable to write his own obituary.
THERE ARE no cards of condolence, no memorial at any
of the three cathedrals that butt-and-bound the Moss Park
Armouries silent as the black wrought iron fence
that circles it, separating the home of the homeless, men
and women, on Queen Street East who stand and wait.
No one shall come by bus, train, aeroplane,
helicopter from the west, the home of the dead man
before he came hopeful, homeless to the east; no one to sing
his praise, to write a poem on his own violence,
gouging the words out of the fragile skin of his life,
mercifully unable to look backwards, onto his murder,
and give the correct punctuation to his narrative.
YOU ARE not the only one to feel the anger poverty breeds;
you are not the only one martyred with nails and kicks,
to the cross of savagery; you are not the only one raised
to glory on a cross, after your crucifixion, blessed
by the silence of raving crowds. On a blessed bier
of marble steps you walked up, counting four,
to reach your bed on the hard cement. One.
Two. Three. Reaching the fourth slab.
And when your feet landed safe,
landed safe in this lonely journey,
alone in the midnight safety you used to know,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday night, early Sunday morning
before the neighbourhood washed their faces and made
the sign of the cross with the same water, with the same hand, there,
on the fourth cement step, was where they found you.
You were already dead, in your sleep, beaten
to everlasting silence, everlasting death, leaves
to ashes, without clothes, naked as at your birth, above
the grave of the marble steps.
AND WHEN the Bishop found you before the morning mass,
he wrapped your death in the drops of holy water,
bathing you in holy proclamation
that you were not only “a child of God”: you were,
he said, the modern-day Jesus Christ, in truth.
“This Lamb of God, we must worship this black Jesus.”
And the congregations sang hymns of adoration and of love.
The sexton had already poured detergent, in more
generous drops than wine, where your body had lain,
making a sign of the cross, on the white marble steps.
IN ANOTHER country, far away from this Toronto cold,
in Italy, in Vicenza, where the swastika and the soaring eagles
escaped the demolition of Nazi architecture which still soars
like pigeons in the park, fighting for the guts,
fighting over the guts of animals
smaller than themselves, where they had captured Jews,
the new illegal citizens, undertakers, illegal
immigrants homeless out of Africa, who sleep on the steps
of this cathedral large as the main post office, large
as a castle, large as a villa for noblemen,
larger still than the Armouries in Moss Park.
HE WAS black before the fury of three soldiers
pointed out his nationality, and had him christened
as the black Messiah of immigrants. But the colour of his skin,
his blackness, is advertised throughout the world
in cities — London, and Amsterdam, Paris, richer
from his labour, but not enriched by his smell of his sweat.
His sweat was sold now by the pirates, explorers who discovered
him, where he was born and lived as an inhabitant,
they found him; and sold the fragrance of his smell,
to merchant ships. His smell was bottled into perfume
vials; smells that could not fumigate the stench
of his enslavement. Youth Dew, Chanel pour Monsieur,
Louis Philippe for Men, even No. 4711 Echt Kolnisch Wasser,
lost their strength. Pimp Oil remains now, strong
as the smell of a carcass mixed with the smell of slavery.
IN BROOKLYN and Harlem, N’Orleans and Halifax, London’s
Notting Hill, Toronto’s Moss Park, the suburban ghetto
of Malvern in the east, and Jane-Finch in the west,
bearing the blame for all iniquities of colour
where luck, good and bad, mostly bad,
placed him in the belly of the pig, in the bowels of the goat,
in the sewer of the bubbling intestines washed in lime juice,
the confidence of cleaning shit from limbs tottering on the brink
of the grave, turned inside out, and then funnelled, forced
through the white enamel ladle; boiled for hours
in superstitious silence.
AND HIS mastery with tails and guts and pig’s snout
turned into a richer inedible thick brown soup;
to paste. And it followed him like a stream of lava, over
the volcanic rock of his journeys in the holds of merchant ships
lying in shit, faeces, amongst other deformed bodies
twisted in the tropical heat; crossing the Atlantic Ocean;
and when he landed in unknown ports, the different
languages, the thicker humidity, breathing now difficult,
disorientated, Bridgetown, Kingston, and Charleston,
Williamstadt, Curacao and Port-au-Prince and Halifax
from l820 onwards.
WINGING JOURNEYS battling immigrants from hot
cotton to humid sugar cane, snake-infested, with whip
and rape memorialized in bronze statues and literature
that reproduced them as beasts, not only beasts, but niggers,
raised aloft on billboards, golliwogs to advertise
the finest in teas and Seville orange marmalades for English
appetites grown in the mid-day sun of India.
THESE THREE soldiers bound for the stifling dust
of Kandahar, one of them, the descendant of slaves,
was their “brother,” their comrade-in-arms. In cowardice
he was joined to them, eventually employed to mark
that difference in his lot pulled out of a hat, not by his own
desire and wish, but scrawled upon his black skin,
in the fallen rotting leaves no longer bright
and yellow and shining clear in the patterns of Persian
and Afghan carpets too expensive for his sm
all soldier’s pittance
of a salary. He had chosen, or had volunteered, to travel miles
in cloud and dust from the yellowing maple leaves in a park,
in a Toronto neighbourhood so safe from the triggers of death.
DID HE ever think of his vantaged view from the nailed
wooden box, plain as a pauper’s coffin as it rests
on the lip of a grave in one of the three cathedrals’
small marble tombs, graves similar to the busy Mount Pleasant
Cemetery on Yonge Street, in the hollow of the road, amongst thick
flowers and mowed grass, the marble headstones, miniature castles
and high-risen sky-scraping condominiums, castles too
lugubrious for death? Didn’t he think of weeping mothers
like his own, recent from Africa, survivor of the crossing,
her memory crammed full of the creaking of ropes
in sails, monotonous as the thick green waves running
in the opposite direction, going back to Africa?
Her history of ships and running water, in holds
in which her body touched men, and was sprinkled by vomit,
and sex in the bowels and high-smelling entrails of that voyage?
That journey? She can remember the past: can fantasize no future.
Let her, in her new grief, therefore weep for your atonement.
And let her weep for hers.
WERE YOU so unprepared as were armies of soldiers in years
gone by, such a coward that you could not use your spear,
your javelin, your Uzi, or a piece of strong rope
to make a necklace with a reef knot, and adorn your bravery
with an act of suicide? Did they not teach you, in drills
and in mercy, the disdain to be captured alive by the enemy,
to do the noble thing, and take your own life?
Years ago, when men thought they were men, in the time
of Roman legions, that act of selfishness was accounted
more brave than to fall into the hands of the enemy. Fall
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