Second Place Winner, February 2005 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

Filed In:

Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Second Place Winner, February 2005

THE GRIOT OF GUANTANAMO BAY
Christopher T. George
(Desert Moon Review)

By ember-light in an acacia clearing, she hums
an Afro-Cuban lullaby as faces watch in shadow:
blood red Caribs, Conquistadors, Communistas.

Dawn at Gitmo: a parched crescent is lapped by
Caribbean blue; skin-tearing cactus, two rows
of chain-link garnished with razor wire.

No longer just sailor accents of Flatbush or
Biloxi, liquid Spanish of Havana or San Juan;
now the guttural of Kabul, Beirut, Teheran,

of captives in prison orange in wire cages.
She claps in time to gourd rattle, calfskin
drum. She’s a news-bringer, praise-singer,

carrying scars for her murdered son.
Ghost guerillas move in the shadows;
chamber click, snake hiss, panther snarl.

Patiently, the griot blows on the embers,
to illumine the future. Underbrush rustles.
A spirit conflagration sets fire to the night

Judge Alex Lemon’s comments: “I was immediately taken by this poem’s first line and read it over and over because of its superb precision. I love how the music here enhances the poem’s loneliness (the mantra-like mini-lists and hard sounds) but works with such melancholic-clarity that it doesn’t become a march; that, in the ember-light and humming, the only possible future this poem allows the griot (or reader for that matter) to see is that of us sculpting away at our own hearts.”