Rhythm

David Rudder comes through the speakers:

Time when the waistline and the bassline take control.

This is the land of oil and music, music for the soul.

I know every word every cord every ping and pong

of the oil drum we bled dry for a steel pan and rhythm section

this music in my soul this reveler living in my bones

these bare feet know every roadside panyard and backyard

every jump-jump and wine-down-low

every big truck and swinging engine

I know Carnival right down the line to Minshall’s Tube Man

his arms stretched all the way to the 1996 Olympics

When you say “Fire Water” I say “Rum ’til I die”

I can turn leggings into fishnet stockings with a single swing of my hips

string cocoa beads and feathers through 3 am J'ouvert to Ash Wednesday

with a flag in my left hand and my right finger pointing to a beach fete on the weekend!

This party NEVER done!

We NOT going home!

We staying right here ’til mornin’ come!

*

But then,

the song is done,

the island sun dipping below the coastline

of a place I once lived, a place that lives in me.

My skin itches against wool and flannel that

can’t keep out a cold tune through this snowdrift.

My feet press flat and dull into city pavements,

shadowed with condominiums sticking their noses

up and away, my neck bent, awkward, trying to learn this new sound.

I toss a coin in a busker's instrument case,

the brass at his lips with a belly like the bottom of the first steel pan

I learned to play in Mr. Benjamin’s music room,

where there were no windowpanes in the frames,

the crisp sound of my education crawling out

and up into the classrooms filled with Jamaica Kincaid,

notes still stilted but in harmony with the history of Columbus,

swallowing the words of Martin Carter.

And I think, as I walk on, yes, Mr. Carter,

This is a dark time, my love.

I am the small change tossed into the case of a place

that reminds me of another place I called home.

A living thing, this thrum, this memory,

within that steel pan song and sorrow.

Behind the cresting iron-drum-orchestra of an entire country,

I am landlocked sound with no salt water to set me free.

I have grown so still, I forget,

the rhythm of who I used to be.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The steel pan is the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago, and an integral part of the culture woven into these twin islands. From school yards to Carnival, to politics, music is like religion in the Caribbean. It is something I miss deeply, as a Guyanese and Trinidad CARICOM National now living in Canada.