Mother Muse

By Lorna Goodison

'Lorna Goodison has come to be recognised as a hugely significant and influential contemporary author both at home and internationally,' Simon Armitage declared, when she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2019. 'Through poems rooted in her Caribbean heritage and upbringing she has created a body of enchanting, intelligent and socially aware poetry in the authentic registers of her own tongue.'Her poems have always found voices for the voiceless and shown another side of history. Her new book zones in on two great under-regarded figures to whom Jamaican music owes a substantial debt: Sister Mary Ignatius and Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood. Sister Iggy, as the boys called her, ran the Alpha Boys School for wayward boys. There she mentored many of Jamaica's most gifted musicians, including the brilliant trombonist Don Drummond. Anita 'Margarita' Mahfood (Mahfouz) was a strikingly beautiful dancer of Lebanese descent, who became Don Drummond's lover. The poems in Mother Muse move boldy and range widely; here are praise songs alongside laments; notable women such as Mahalia Jackson share pages with the less well noted - women like Sandra Bland, Windrush victims and two of the last enslaved women to be set free.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Aug 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800171107

Lorna Goodison

Lorna Goodison is an internationally recognized poet who has published eight books of poetry and two collections of short stories. In 1999 she received the Musgrave Gold Medal from Jamaica, and her work has been widely translated and anthologized in major collections of contemporary poetry. Born in Jamaica, Goodison now teaches at the University of Michigan. She divides her time between Ann Arbor and Toronto.

Book preview

NEW YEAR’S MORNING 1965

Out of the mesh mouth radio the news strains at dawn:

He’d killed her and surrendered to the Rockfort police.

Recall this: some said she was wild woman; fair game

for one straight blade to the heart.

You stayed in bed and wept. Common knowledge:

His light was inclined to combust into violence.

For his unburied birth caul shaded him, made the slide

stick and drive him to madhouse. Cramp and paralyze him.

Times he broke free, his horn work outshone Gabriel’s.

Alumnus of Alpha Boys School for the wayward, his mother

handed him over to Sister Mary Ignatius, nun more deserving

of a T.V. show than the high flying one of starched cornette;

she was a devotee of rhythm and blues, jazz, bebop

and all other worldly music. Athlete and able coach of cricket,

boxing, football, netball, and table tennis.

Sister Iggy, as deejay, played the speeches of Malcolm X

for young Black men she helped master musical instruments.

Hail Iggy’s students taking our own home-grown music

all over the known world! She loved Don like her own.

Thinned rosary beads petitioning for his peace;

and for Anita ‘Margarita’ Mahfouz second-generation

daughter of Lebanon, gorgeous Bohemian, Alpha woman,

blessed and cursed with nurse spirit; she, a fellow traveler

with worthy women devotees of Love without borders,

was billed most times as a rhumba dancer. Few discerned

how her steps retraced desert routes of camel trains.

One night you caught her act at the Ad Astra, but had no words

in those days to describe her.

The atoms in that smoky place on Windward Road stirred

sands storm that caused wine bibbers to weep into rum cups.

And all in these poems would have come under the influence

of Rastafari ‘The Earth Most Strangest (Wo)man’.

Thus spoke Ras Kumi.

And these words are offered in thanks to those who started flames

that consumed them as they blazed trails so we are now free to be:

musicians, dancers, thinkers, writers, artists, mystics.

THE NEAR NOONDAY DANCE OF SISTER IGGY

When Sister Ignatius performs her near noonday dance,

the swing skirts of her long habit polish her ankles.

‘Veni sancti spiritus’ she intones till paraclete

manifests, enfolds her in winged arms; they waltz.

Unseen yet ever near, sweet spirit turns in key holes,

pours concrete walls, limbos under barred windows.

She knows not how, but their lock-step kickstarts

alleluia, alleluias tumbling through breeze blocks.

Spirit inquires, ‘Dear Sister, how are our charges’

‘You mean our boys lost, abandoned, wayward?

Doing well. They carry the good news of our home

grown music to audiences all over the known world.

They have been found, give thanks, by music’s grace.

Our Alpha musicians are now musical ambassadors!’

Divine presence allows, ‘O Mary Ignatius, well done’,

air kisses her on the brow; she finds herself alone.

Sister Iggy clasps her hands. Sister Iggy bows her head.

The bell sounds for noon prayers; hers have been said.

SUGAR

Perfumed by sugar’s money musk, her newly refined

ancestors took upon themselves airs of mount plenty.

Aromatic sweet canes render bitter waters potable.

Cane’s cultivators—the millions of stolen Africans

counted by Massa as less-than; and the young Mary

was raised not to follow their ways or consider them

playmates. ‘For you and them are not companion’.

But the girl was alive and quick to her people’s music.

Shivered her feet to burru drums, sheltered wild notes

escaped from blackbird work gangs, marked converter

call to score new beats drummed into barrel staves

the one-drop way. She made moan to sorrow songs—

belly-band of what hard labour breaks. O the dig and

plant and weed and cut and juice and boil, blood and

toil required for brute cane to achieve sweet mouth,

out of which would come our music.

A ROSE FROM SAINT THERESE

O little Therese of the child Jesus, pick for me a rose