From the Archives: Word (on teaching a forty-year-old man to read)

Esther Phillips

 

He trusted me to break the word, crack
each segment open until the mystery expired.
Not so this morning.  He stared bewildered
at the board, the back at me.  “I never t’ought
dat word could be so small.  F…i…x,”
he mused.  “Dis word so small.”

How could his daily toil of hammer,
saw and nails; an old lady’s reckoning
of last month’s window
against the patching of a roof this week—
how could her life of sacrifice
and his of labour, sweat and boiling sun
be totalled up in this small word?

He’d hit on more than wood or nails:
the point of intersection old as time itself
            between word and meaning,
promise and keeping,
            living and learning.

 

This Poem was originally published in ArtsEtc: The Premier Cultural Guide to Barbados No. 16, the Art Education II issue.

Esther Phillips is the poet laurate of Barbados.  She is the award-winning author of When Ground Doves Fly (Ian Randle Publishers, 2003), The Stone Gatherer (Peepal Tree Press, 2009), Leaving Atlantis (Peepal Tree Press, 2015), and Witness in Stone (Peepal Tree Press, 2021).

Barbadian Literature
Caribbean Literature
poetry