“Anthropology,” a Poem by Ishion Hutchinson

6 days ago

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“Anthropology”

The houses are shut, the neighbors gone
to the burning field at the mangrove’s edge,
where the heatstruck anthropologist writes
his prophecy in a wrenched tense:
“Their gods…they’ve drowned.”
All day I choke on the pages’ knotted vines:
the totems will be covered, the Revivalists’
prayer poles, the rain woman’s dance,
her rattle sticks beating the earth, until
the clothesline quivers like a Spanish
fly, pressed to a concrete block
by a boy, aiming his blunt needle

The workers will return at dark, at the beetle’s horn,
to the shack alley, to the rasps of Sankeys
on the dead man’s moth-meshed veranda;
they will gather for nine nights to the prophet’s
rum-riddled call, with cocoa pods, mint bush,
cerasse, Bay Rum, Bible leaves and Phensic—
they will gnash teeth and groan epiphanies
with swaying bottle lamps over the fowl’s blood
spilled on the ash, and on a body, with the dead’s
tongue, warning all before morning. Frenetic,
without proper exegesis, I cut stone-cold
through the bush-lane home.

But the sugar-headed children will wander
the field at night, lost to the scavenging
green, eating the ripe flux of the land,
and then emptying their guts in the river
no longer worshipped, now a machine,
like the factory’s tractor passing, loaded
with burnt canes, their foreheads white
with marl dust. Their eyes burn, gazing
at the half-yam moon—their tribe’s
biography, a possession they cannot read.
They clatter away, children and tractors,
threading the coiled sleep that will not loosen
into the meagre flash beyond suffering—
the light opening a book towards a simplicity
hard to achieve, though they are simple saints.
In the final dusk they head for the hill
holding up the sky, the shutterless, dozing shacks—
the hill they will rise to before work and play,
the hill that will rise before tomorrow’s dead.