What Rough Beast | 06 23 20 | Mervyn Taylor

Mervyn Taylor
Three Poems

Lockdown

In South Africa, the old lady said,
under apartheid, every day we were
stopped and asked to show our pass.
Isolation is not new to us, we’ve been
locked down a long time. Now we stay
inside, and sing songs about Madiba,
how because of him, the hospital has
to treat us; our sons and daughters
work there. They help turn the sick
face down, so all the patient sees are
the plastic covers on the doctors’ shoes,
the bin in the far corner, overflowing.

Corona Song

This is the dying season, everyone
confined to his house, children at
the window singing an old folksong,

Every time you pass, you tickle me.
Their faces are bright, like the sun over
the Savannah, where huts and tents

remaining from Carnival wait to be
dismantled till this time next year.
By then I should have finished my

own calypso, and my voice should
have returned, as strong as ever,
thanks to the air, and these hills.

Distancing

I’ll return when i can hug you,
when the jealous beast
has gone its way,
when the old sugar mill
has rusted into sad beauty,
and milk from the dairy
is again safe to drink. When
the sun has burned traces of
bodies into the ground, lonely
patches of grass between them,
I will cross the street, a man
with a piece of paper looking for
an address, assuring people, she
lived around here, somewhere,
meaning you, love, whom I
kept my distance from, sailing
from island to island, searching
among naked girls in the Carnival.

—Submitted on 04/28/2020

Mervyn Taylor, a Trinidad-born, longtime Brooklyn resident, has taught at Bronx Community College, The New School, and in the NYC public school system. He’s the author of six books of poetry, including No Back Door (Shearsman Books, 2010) and The Waving Gallery (Shearsman Books, 2014). A new collection, Country of Warm Snow, is forthcoming in 2020. Taylor serves on the advisory board of Slapering Hol Press.

SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value What Rough Beast, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.