Cynthia James (Trinidad and Tobago)
Por: Cynthia James
Sugar Aloes
this wake
this vigil
this salt as will
not moisten these rocks
as bare no lids to close
friends fall asleep
prophets sop sweetened aloes
how dims my rosary
ring of gold
outside rebellion rattles
. . . and now
the bamboo dies
the wind scatters
fingerprints of memory
from the underside
of the fern
my children
Madonna's angels
sing but no songs
cross their lips
the moon the sun
gaze like comets
into this uncurtained wind
o upon this calendar
of fragmented grief
I turn . . .
Cynthia James was born in Trinidad and Tobago where she lives and teaches. She is a lecturer in Language Education in the Faculty of Humanities and Education at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. She graduated from Howard University, Washington, D.C. with a Ph.D. in English in 1998. Academically, Cynthia is published in journals and books such as World Literature Today, Wasafiri, Jouvert: A Journal of Post-Colonial Studies, and For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Brathwaite. She has one book of literary criticism, The Maroon Narrative, a narrative history of Caribbean literature in English, published by Heinemann in 2002. Cynthia is a writer of poetry and fiction. She has three collections of poetry, Iere, My Love, Vigil, and La Vega and other poems. Her second novel Sapodilla Terrace was published earlier this year, 2006. Her creative work can be found in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Sisters of Caliban: Contemporary Women Writers of the Caribbean, The Massachusetts Review, the New Theater Review, the Farleigh Dickinson Review, and regionally in the Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, and the Caribbean Writer. Cynthia has twice been a James Michener fellow at the University of Miami Caribbean Writers Summer Institute. She has also received a National Endowment for the Humanities Award for studies in classic literary texts of the English-speaking Caribbean. In 2004 she was a visiting writer and fellow at the Hong Kong Baptist University International Writers Workshop, and in 2005 she was a participant in the 29th Cambridge Seminar on contemporary literature at Cambridge University, UK.
