Chant for the Waters and Dirt and Blade (excerpt)

Desiree C. Bailey

The brutal French colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean.
1791. Onset of what will be known as the Haitian Revolution.
A young woman, enslaved, yearns for freedom,
guided by the goddess of the sea.

I am I    but I won’t spill my name
not here on this damned rock    pushed out bloody
from the bowels of the sea        marketplace island
where the cloud’s crest    and birdsong all for sale

profit of my black    my stewed puss on the plate
in the belly of my captor
                                       what am I    what dare I
greased up to quiet the squeak    a howl camouflaged
destined to burst forth    murderous as a wave
meek today        tomorrow cupped for my inheritance
of rage        my name soldiers up like bile        but I dare
not allow it        swallow it    bury it
down with the other human parts        of me
I husk of girl orphaned        at the ocean’s distant edge
before ship        before humid choke of hull
before trade winds splintering me off into the world’s directions

a girl an I unbroken and spotless smooth as obsidian’s kiss

To celebrate National Poetry Month we are again presenting an April Celebration: 30 Poets/30 Presses (#ArmchairBookFair21), a feature we initiated last year to help promote new releases whose publicity opportunities were thwarted due to the pandemic. Please join us every day for new poetry from the presses that sustain us.

Feature Date

April 22, 2021

Series

Selected By

Share This Poem

Print This Poem

Adapted from WHAT NOISE AGAINST THE CANE, by Desiree C. Bailey
Published by Yale University Press.
Copyright © 2021 Yale University Press.
Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

Photo:
Wilton Schereka

Featured Poet

Desiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. Desiree was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Featured Translator

Buy This Book

BOOKSHOP

INDIEBOUND

PUBLISHER

What Noise Against the Cane

Yale University Press

New Haven, Connecticut

Yale University

Featured book

The 115th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets, What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration, and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation, and womanhood. Series judge Carl Phillips observes that Bailey’s “poems argue for hope and faith equally. . . . These are powerful poems, indeed, and they make a persuasive argument for the transformative powers of steady defiance.”

“Bailey invites us to see what twenty-first-century life is like for a young woman of the Black diaspora in the long wake of a history of slavery, brutality, and struggling for freedoms bodily and psychological.”
—Carl Phillips, from the Foreword

Poetry Daily Depends on You

With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.