Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné

Earth aflame por D.B.Fortuné

Feliz. Feliz. Feliz.  Tuve la gran oportunidad de coordinar una charla virtual, seguida por una conversación, con Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné en el salón de clases.   Y nos dejó con las ganas de conocer aún más sobre su manera de ver el Caribe.  Fue muy inspiradora. 

Ella nació en Trinidad y Tobago, y desde Tunapuna escribe y crea su obra visual. A continuación, dos de sus poemas:

On Being Burnt

The burning starts with a word

a struck match,
a searing fist.

You lie still.
You are so tired
of struggling

and there is no one waiting
to beat down the door
and save you from burning
inside your own body.

Someone once told you
that love must be borne
tight against your breasts
like an orphaned thing,
a calcified child.

You’ve been carrying yours
like this, all these years….
swaddled in sheets,
pressed up hard
against your lungs.
.

Still, you’ve always known
that the wild thing
would not be satisfied
with bread alone

that one day
it would hear
your heart’s thin shriek
beneath all the flammable layers
of cotton and skin

that the thing
you brought to your bed
would burn you.

And now, nothing is left
of your eaten self
but smoke, rising
from the house
never yours
to begin with.

In the bushes
something picks your hair
from its teeth,
walks upright
toward some other death.

On Not Becoming Useless

The truth is,

I write poems to keep myself

from becoming useless.

You see,

my fingers only work a thin magic

on seasoning, not enough to

curl bellies and astound tongues.

I don’t know how to bring senses to a boil,

lift spices to their perfect pitch,

how to claim this counter

as part of my kingdom.

The kitchen makes me nervous,

burns down my soul to scrapings.

I am careless,

like my grandmother says.

I am always barefooted,

absent-minded.

I forget little,

remember even less.

Now,

I know poems are not bread.

They cannot fill the belly,

But what poems do, you see,

is keep me from becoming that woman

who walks to the edge of the earth

and falls,

leaving not one truth

behind.

Among the Fallen Things
por D.B. Fortuné

Mucho más en su portal: Half-Broken Things.