THE AROMA OF HER LIFE
A poem written after the Antigua government teargassed demonstrators for assembling to participate in a demonstration it refused to permit.
If you allow my hand in yours, we’ll be two distinct substances intermingling to be each more sublime.
For a long time, I remained eager for this evolution to be that which I cannot become alone.
It wasn’t just the blackness of your unblemished skin, or the brown eyes which, at times, announced the moods of your heart that attracted me to you like the bee to pollen must dart.
Nor was it your colored locks alone, which seemed, then and now, as intricately woven together as the plot of our checkered Caribbean history.
You were more, yes, more than the striking form the balladeers revered in their sentimental songs.
I can recall the moment you appeared as the affirmation of what my inauthentic being yearned for. There, in the Market Square on August 8th, 2021, you dared to say aloud, “I want to breathe freely.”
From the dense, teargas cloud released by the security forces to choke your voice, I saw you ascend and with clenched fist raised high, pierced the thick darkness obscuring the light of day.
At that instant, you made of rebellion a beautiful art, its graphic image, etched permanently in my memory.
All things, thereafter, came together as one out of a potpourri of delightful traits which has remained the aroma of your life.
In the midst of the terror, You were the flambeau Which illuminated the way to you, the cradle where life for me began anew.
Here we are now in this convoluted moment of indifference and ambivalence, when silence is preferred to utterances, conviction is bartered for trinkets and the putrid smell of deceit lingers long in the evening air.
Yet, you and me,
Can still appreciate the realism in the art of rebellion.
Alvette E. Jeffers
[November 18, 2022]
