Poem
Dorothea Smartt
AUBERGINE ANGELS
AUBERGINE ANGELS
AUBERGINE ANGELS
Inside Old Street station,I meet my Waterloo:
Aubergine Afros, primed,
shining and armed, wrestle
my gaze from briefcases,
from city zombies’ eyes;
the sweating on the back
of broad builders’ T-shirts;
a small boy’s arms running
with ice-cream: a bacon
sarnie in the happy
mouth of a homeless man.
Arrested by the sight!
– the light of grander dark
halos moving me up
and out. So I exit
to City Road behind
young Black boys. Black angels.
© 2013, Dorothea Smartt
From: Ship Shape
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press, Leeds
From: Ship Shape
Publisher: Peepal Tree Press, Leeds
Dorothea Smartt
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1963)
Dorothea Smartt has been a prominent voice for black women poets since the 1980s, called by her mentor Kamau Braithwaite the ‘Brit-born Bajan International’. If this sounds like a movement, call it a movement towards voice, as Smartt claims for her work what she refers to as her ‘two voices’: her ‘London voice’ of standard English, and her ‘Bajan voice’ – the voice of her childhood and her dre...
Poems
Poems of Dorothea Smartt
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AUBERGINE ANGELS
Inside Old Street station,I meet my Waterloo:
Aubergine Afros, primed,
shining and armed, wrestle
my gaze from briefcases,
from city zombies’ eyes;
the sweating on the back
of broad builders’ T-shirts;
a small boy’s arms running
with ice-cream: a bacon
sarnie in the happy
mouth of a homeless man.
Arrested by the sight!
– the light of grander dark
halos moving me up
and out. So I exit
to City Road behind
young Black boys. Black angels.
From: Ship Shape
AUBERGINE ANGELS
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