Your Absence is a Barren Universe without Nursing Suns

dear father —

what is this canker pimpling your heart / this lesion blistering your weathered bark?

father / your ironbark is gray and furrowed / dead and undead branches / buttery croissant / flaking from the gentlest of touch

i utter your name and my mouth hives with jack spaniards i pirogue oceanic memories and my eyes flower into a blaze of stardust

oh fair eucalyptus / tamarind-scented summer how far you’ve tumbled below the evening horizon

horrid vesper / horripilated skin / horoscopic fortune canopied by La Brea’s fumous bitumen  

like plaster / you’ve sealed yourself off from me / beloved father my erstwhile rafter / my illuminated ceiling / in the upstairs attic

your aging tree trunk is a jeremiad of livid black effuse a Pepysian diary of cankers / scribbled in decades / aeons and lifetimes

i can discern their yapping infinitude tattooed along the base — gashes from the mower of your son’s eternal Odinsleep

unhealed fungal wounds / the sunscald of your sister’s passing bruises from divergence / continental drifts:

separations / drifting away / blood estrangement 

and there is the irksome silence that struts along keeping its haughty chin up / for all breathing to see —

silent days / silent nights / silent cards and silent heart

i remember your silent tongue / many inglorious februaries past  when you left me alone / in pain / to scald with boiling water

molten rivers of iron / railing across / the archipelago of my face my neck / my shoulders / my chest

my soprano screams / shattering the West Bank of my mother’s womb and you / fatefully spared / finding scant solace in feigned arthritis a serendipitous godsend you hastily plucked / to save your own hide

and whom i shall turn to / if not my own Fred G. Sanford? i am hurled into a restive Demerara / a furry coalition of wild dogs

charging and dispersing and leaping in monstrous bounds the radar dishes of their ears / lowered into hunting position

your absence is a barren universe without nursing suns the Amazon rainforest without angelic mists / sobbing rain a sylvan mangrove shoreline without its tellurian sea salt

today i telescope the lunation of your full moon the small pox of your absence / cratered in facial scars hidden away under layers and layers of Venetian ceruse

your fatherness as i reckon is the apotheosis of Elizabeth: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene / Diana / Maid of Heaven — 

a relic upon which fawning worship and praise is reserved while you bask in the high mountains / not wishing to descend

but father / descend you must / because i am your sole living seed i am the flowering branch of your burgeoning eucalyptus

whose roots plough Moruga / carnal lover of nocturnal secrets.

Joel Anthony Harris

Joel Anthony Harris is a Trinidadian poet, artist and editor. In 2020 he was shortlisted at Into The Void's Poetry Prize. His poems are forthcoming in Cream City Review, and Poetry London's Spring 2023 issue and have been published in The Malahat Review, Door Is A Jar, Heavy Feather Review, PRISM International, Berkeley Poetry Review and Anthropocene. He has edited and contributed to The Alpha Barrier of North South Dialogue and The Twilight of America's Omnipresence: China's Aggrandizement in a New Era of Multipolarity that was the subject of congressional testimony in 2015. He's a member of U.K.'s Poetry Society. He's also the co-founder of Sirius International Caribbean Defence Contractors Ltd., where he has been leading outreach programs, as well as counter-radicalization workshops with high schools. A McGill University undergrad pursuing a double major in English Cultural Studies and Anthropology.