Beyond the Middle Passage: Selected Poetry

By Gerald Morris

Beyond the Middle Passage deals with a range of issues affecting the lives of black people in the Caribbean and elsewhere. It presents a Caribbean setting as most of the experiences refer to life in that part of the world. Though there are several theories relating to why the plights of black people are as they are, the author highlights what he thinks are powerful reasons and arguments for the apparent state of malaise, as he sought through poetry to document the social, spiritual, economic, psychological, and political factors impinging on their existence over the years. It also hopes to inspire people to find creative ways out of their present situations.

The middle passage is the term used to describe the sea journey of native West Africans who were captured, sold into slavery, and transported from their homeland across the Atlantic to the New World in tightly packed slave ships. This was a horrendous journey in which many died on account of diseases and inhumane conditions aboard the slave ships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781503515208

Gerald Morris

When Gerald Morris was in fifth grade he loved Greek and Norse mythology and before long was retelling the stories to his younger sister and then to neighborhood kids. He began carrying a notebook in which he kept some of the details related to the different stories. The joy he found in retelling those myths continued when he discovered other stories. According to Gerald Morris, “I never lost my love of retelling the old stories. When I found Arthurian literature, years later, I knew at once that I wanted to retell those grand tales. So I pulled out my notebook . . . I retell the tales, peopling them with characters that I at least find easier to recognize, and let the magic of the Arthurian tradition go where it will.” Gerald Morris lives in Wausau, Wisconsin, with his wife and their three children. In addition to writing he serves as a minister in a church.

Book preview

BEYOND THE PASSAGE

Why does it seem that Negroes in the main,

Saddled with a slant,

Are eyed by some with pain?

Could it speak to the passage,

Uprooted people harnessed

With callous cruelty, denied heritage?

A broken history, life lived by layer,

Heroes consigned to back pages,

In hoarse tone sob quietly in prayer.

In the ensuing centuries, repeating,

The perceived flaws in a psyche

Thriving in a vacuum, adapting.

To remain there, nursing an ethos

Bred by poverty, in a milieu

Where they are brushed away like dust.

No one takes the tab for this charge.

Restitution for past sins

Can’t assuage the instilled damage

But smooth bigot hearts with jagged edges,

While the skins of victims peel

As society’s baronet slices as if by pledge.

Even atypical, a colored ascends

To the chair at the manor’s table;

Respite evidently descends.

Was it written or, by some accident, ravaged

By a virus taunting a people?

Or were the blessed buried in the passage?

AFTERSHOCKS

Traumatic shock waves, through time,

Blunt not the neurosis

Rippling through the limbic of the afflicted.

History’s a hag time can’t kill.

Coursed residue pangs subtly cut

Deeper with fresh knives.

Victims betrayed by dim-witted chiefs

Giddied by the lure of gems,

Fruits plucked from huts carted to the coasts.

The deep waters lined with corpses,

With stench filtering through time

Undiluted, ingrained in heads.

Cruelty visited on a people, mined

Like teaks from the tropical bush, inserted jewels

Blood laced in the coffers of Albion.

The stamps of the fetters on bloodied wrists

And raw ankles sheaved by shackles,

Canned like braised mackerels en route to misery.

Their progeny, in the main, a cohort sits,

With meager lives, eyes blurred,

Bloodshot, gazing on the glassy sea.

Oblivious of world-famed Pitons pillaring

To the sky: on the right, resorts, five starred;

Patrimony denied as they amble beneath

The almond trees. Time-slaying

Isn’t murder, but enabling one’s own

Earthly demise is already exhibiting hints

Seemingly from impaired psyches.

Permit not humanity’s heart be appeased

By the dearth of a clamor

Chanting the woes of prior iniquity.

Other untidy gashes on history’s face

Spare not the chance to prompt eternity

Of their own roasting in cruel furnace

But were favored to regroup, their ethos

Rekindled—Negritude isn’t even in the race.

DEFLOWERED

Barely clad torso,

skin loosely swathes bones;

gaunt and uncomely, her frame

warms the gold cache’s