Incoherencies

By Richard E. Fawkes

“Tropic bird flies the winter skies then homes in through poetic memory.” “Exploring love, loss, and cultural memory through poetry.”
What if you spent your childhood on a warm, pristine island, visited every year by birds fleeing the cold north? Or “strange” people from the same clime, “snowbirds” wanting to walk in shorts along your white sandy beaches or swim in your turquoise sea in winter? Some of the birds end up as delicacy on your dinner table; some of the snowbirds buy property and build houses on your island. Then, as you never imagined, you spend most of your life from early adulthood in the land of the winter birds, feathered and human. How do you ever find “home” again, or make sense of the lives you’ve lived? This little book of poetry invites just such a search — a journey to revisit, re-live, understand and appreciate what might have been lost; or to uncover what might have not been lost at all but was always there.
Poetry has always been personal and experiential for Richard E. Fawkes — never really intended for publishing or public sharing. So, while he has written and published as a journalist, and even had a play, Facin duh Mirrah, staged in Berkeley, California and Nassau, Bahamas, his poems were always confined to his journals. They were his way of “working out” and “making sense” to himself difficult and trying and, yes, joyous experiences and occurrences in his life and the world around him. It is from these private places and experiences in his life traversing his native Bahamas and the United States of America that incoherencies sprang.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Apr 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781698706962

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Copyright 2021 Richard E. Fawkes.

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ISBN: 978-1-6987-0697-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6987-0696-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021908182

Trafford rev. 04/21/2021

To My Children

LISA ANATOL ADRIENNE GABRIEL MALCOLM

PHOTOGRAPHS

Photos 1 – 5 were taken by the author:

1. Cover: Empty conch shells on the beach at Sandy Point, Abaco following the conch-cracking contest at the Sandy Point Homecoming Regatta, Labour Day Weekend, June 2005

2. Abaco Stories - Page 1: Class C sailboats competing in the Sandy Point Homecoming Regatta, June 2005

3. Art of Love - Page 17: Seagulls at the public dock in the settlement of Fox Town, Little Abaco (named after the author’s paternal great grandparents, Tom Fox and Eunice Johnson Fox, who first settled there at the turn of the 20th Century) on Emancipation Day, August 1, 2005

4. States of Mind - Page 35: Murphy Town, Abaco sunset, December 2005

5. Bahamas Rear View - Page 55: The scene on the morning following the devastating fire in the Haitian immigrant shantytown, The Mud, Marsh Harbour, Abaco on November 17, 2005. Seventy-four-year-old Celianese Dorsicas (affectionately called Yaya by her grandchildren), in whose house the fire started with the accidental overturning of a kerosene oil lamp while she was looking for her Bible to attend prayer meeting, burned to death; over 100 homes were destroyed and hundreds of men, women and children displaced.

Photo of the author on Page 77 was taken by his late wife Paulette B. Alston Fawkes, at the 2003 New Year’s Day Junkanoo Festival in Green Turtle Cay, Abaco.

CONTENTS

Photographs

Preface

Abaco Stories

ABACO RAIN

… OOOH HOW SWEET.

JESS DUH MAWNIN DOVE

ABACO FOOTSTEPS

SEAGULL

AT THE WATER’S EDGE

THE VILLAGE OF PERPETUAL MOURNING

NOSTALGIA

Art Of Love

THE JAPANESE