Tuesday, September 27, 2011

With Cancer and With Child by Dr. Harold Mahabir

Of Things, Sketches and Reflections is one of the early publications by Trinidad-born, Dr. Harold Mahabir, who is an adjunct member of the College Prep Department. This poem was published in the Trinidad Express, one of the leading Caribbean newspapers, when his book was reviewed, "I like these poems which were featured by the Express, not only for there indigenous settings, but for the symbolic strength and endurance of woman."

Her time skated on the hazards
of a roller, on the tumorous ball
tossed to jerk and rhythm
of her lung. And each blood-bit coughed up
was a little life-spill.
Wells for eyes,their ink
wrote the lustres of her life
marked hope with her hand
on the limbs moving in her womb.
There lay the continuity
amid nature's felling nonchalance.
her hair flared down her shoulder
like a prayer-shawl,plaited into thickness
like a rope moored to the gates
of a Seventh Heaven, to the mat folded
after her noon-tide zorah.
She prayed on the count of her beads
a hundred times around.Acceptance
fulfilled her extended hands, peace
numbed her to the probe in her spine.
And her strength became memorial.

Monday, September 12, 2011

A Message to Students by Bert Lorenzo

As a youth I set a goal.
I would read more, think more,
remember more and know more
than anyone in the room.
I knew the competition prepared
so I prepared to meet the challenge.
What about you?
If we meet someday
do you think you could read, think,
remember and know more than me?
Will you prepare for the challenge?
Now’s the time.


Copyright Bert Lorenzo, 2011