Quotes Flashcards
My mother’s kitchen:
‘Her vine in the front garden / Which spread’
‘Her glasses, some tall and lean’
‘My mother is planning another escape, for the first time home is her destination’
‘An ugly collection from various sets’
Kumukanda:
‘Tata’s people would think me unfinished’
‘Boys of our tribe must cross in order to die and come back grown’
‘The man I almost grew to call Dad’
‘and my father’s father’s father?’
Peckham Rye Lane:
‘As damp and crammed as a coconut shell’
‘clutching drumsticks like weapons’
‘angels gaze from the treetops like William Blake’
‘each person is a sturdy hairbrush bristle
‘like salted jellyfish, tentacle pink’
‘briny in racks of rainbow’
Island Man:
‘his small emerald island’
‘Island man heaves himself / Another London day’
‘the sun surfacing defiantly’
‘the steady breaking and wombing’
‘blue surf’
‘grey metallic soar’
Clear and gentle stream:
‘Clear and gentle stream!’
‘Where my old seat was / Here again I sit’
‘known and loved so long’
‘And then evening comes’
‘the deep bell hums.. and then evening comes’
‘that hast heard the song and the idle dream’
Mild the mist:
‘Mild the mist upon the hill’
‘The horizon’s mountain chain’
‘cloudy evening fall’
‘sweet mists of summer pall’
‘The day has wept its fill, spent its store of silent sorrow’
‘neath my father’s sheltering roof’
To my sister:
‘Your morning task resign’
‘For this one day we’ll give to idleness’
‘one moment now may give us more than years of toiling reason’
‘there is a blessing in the air’
‘the redbreast sings’
‘Our minds shall drink at every pore’
Emigree:
‘My shadow falls as evidence of sunlight’
‘it may be sick with tryrants’
‘docile as paper’
‘bright, filled paperweight’
‘that child language I carried here’
‘they accuse me of being dark in their free city’
Jamaican British:
‘The English boys at school made me choose; Jamaican, British’
‘You cannot love sugar and hate your sweetness’
‘knowing how to war is Jamaican British’
‘Some people would deny’
In Wales:
‘Making yourself understood without saying a word’
‘lounging by a vespa with a cigarette’
‘wanting to declare like Freddie Mercury you are from somewhere like Zanzibar’
‘To say aloud without embarrassment’
‘dying to be french, dying to shrug and pout’
I remember:
‘He never came a wink too soon’
‘But not I often wish the night had borne my breath away’
‘those flowers made of light’
‘My spirit flew in feathers then that is so heavy now’
Captain Cook:
‘As actual but more pleasant than what the day now brings’
‘mid the storm and strife’
‘the life that cometh after dwell in a darker shade’
‘there is not of that garden a single tree or flower’
Sunday Dip:
‘and laugh to hear the thunder in their ears’
‘the others float away’
‘try to lose their fears’
‘the morning road is thronged with merry boys’
We refugees:
‘I come from a musical place where they shoot me for my song’
‘all my family were born there’
‘we all came here from somewhere’
‘I am told I have no country now’
‘A great old forest, I think it is now a field’
‘where tourists go to darken skin’
‘I come from a beautiful place, where they hate the shade of my skin’
Us:
‘As if from one coast you could reach out / to the next’
‘when I was you, us equally meant me’
‘my hearts sunk at separation of us’
‘oi you, tell us where yer from’
‘colour me unsure’
‘where I’d give myself away, stranded’
