Mama River

By | 15 May 2017
This river is not my mother.





My mother is the red knot in my eye


            My mother is this necklace of beads and bone


                        My mother is lichen, moss and undergrowth


                                    My mother is salt, tide and undertow


                                                My mother is an unstitched tear, an echo chamber


                                                            My mother is the place where my son is not


                                                My mother is the absence of my father


                                    She is named in the image of God.
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Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and visual artist from Trinidad and Tobago. She is the winner of the 2016 Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry, the 2015 Hollick-Arvon Caribbean Writers’ Prize and the 2013 Small Axe Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including The Caribbean Writer, Small Axe, Anthurium, Room Magazine and in the anthology Coming Up Hot: Eight New Poets from the Caribbean (Peekash Press, 2015).

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