The heart of darkness is not Africa.

The heart of darkness is the core of fire

in the white center of the holocaust.

–Derek Walcott
In Kingston, the sirens fill the twilight air—

the curfew begins with casual ease

and the slow emptying of the street

before the staining of streets

with the mute lights of a city hiding from itself.
The people are stoic:

“If a dead we fi dead, den a dead we mus dead.”

Or perhaps this is resignation. Down in the market,

the strugglers announce themselves,

they say “Look around you, look around you,

who do you see, face-to-face,

if not we are the strugglers, while the safe

hide in their mansions and wait.”

This did not begin as a song of class and power,

it began as a pastiche of sorts,

a strained pastoral of an island waiting for the chaos

of bodies falling away. And the older women

are in their gardens gathering

ginger root, cerise, thyme, mint leaf,

shame-old-lady, and the poetry

of invention in the names of the leaves

that will stave off death—

Leaf of Refresh My Lungs, Leaf of Woman Power,

Leaf of Forgive My Sins, Leaf of Charity and Grace,

Leaf of Africa Vengeance, Leaf of Fall Back and Rise.

At dawn the roll call—the ritual of obituaries;

the men are slipping away;

the veteran artists; it is as if their persistence

is an affront—Ellis Marsellis, Bob Andy,

Bill Withers, the mourning arrives in feeds,

tiny bytes of dispensable lamentations—

blue lights, green lights, white lights,

the scrolling screen of images flashing,

the truncated sentiment, the pocket grief;

where will the slow march to the funeral be,

and where the high-stepping,

the weeping, the performance of joy

under spinning, gleaming umbrellas?

This is how a culture is made.

“Bring out your dead!” Ecuador, Iran, “Bring out your dead.”

In Kingston, they have taken to calling

the police The Virus, and, “It a come, it a come

it a come.” To think that beside the dispatches

from Kingston, Aba, did you think

it could come to this?

Did you think it could come to this?

I read Saint-John Perse’s lament to Friday,

and pray never to be an alien to the earth

I long to rest my soul in.  But all of this is a vanity,

a deep misguiding vanity, while the world

collapses around us. All these contagions,

and the American President chuckles at his soaring numbers:

“My TV Ratings last night were higher

than the Super Bowl, did you see that?”

What monstrosity have we wrought

that we have no language to speak of it?

And here come the sirens,

the Virus are turning the corner,

in their masks and with their batons,

“Ba-by, Ba-by-lon, Ba-by, Ba-by-lon, Ba-by, Ba-by-lon.”

Here, in the cave of my study, here where I study

the necromancy of verse,

and horde my secret fantasies—

I can’t share this hidden ration with anyone,

I simply hide and chew, lick away the residue

and face the family. Here on the soft fabric

of paper pulled from wood, preserved between

sheets of soft-beaten cotton strips,

I confess that the virus may have arrived

in the tender embrace of love, a friend

or a stranger, or a tainted breeze

in the daily rituals of labor and living,

and I search out the economics of death—

will my family owe the taxes I owe?

Will they be free to step out into the new season,

protected, kept, debt free?

What must I do to prepare? What instructions?

How to be clear that these are the ordering of a life,

not a note of a suicidal depressive? You see why

I dare not shout this from the roofs?

This is what Babylon the Virus has done to us.