Only one of me, p.1
Only One of Me, page 1
For Myra
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
When I Dance Seeing Granny
Listn Big Brodda Dread, Na!
Scribbled Notes Picked Up by Owners, and Rewritten
Letter from Your Special-Big-Puppy-Dog.
Letter from Your Kitten-Cat-Almost-Big-Cat.
From Your Colourful-Guinea Pig.
Letter from Your Rabbit.
Letter from Your horse.
You see, I sign a letter myself Pig.
A Toast for Everybody Who is Growin
A Different Kind of Sunday
Breath Pon Wind
Mum Dad and Me
Black Kid in a New Place
Let Me Rap You My Orbital Map
Shapes and Actions
A Story about Afiya
Leaps of Feeling
When I Dance
Quick Ball Man
In Play We Play
The Barkday Party
One
Boy Alone at Noon
Coming Home On My Own
Getting Nowhere
Skateboard Flyer
It Seems I Test People
Dreaming Black Boy
What Do We Do with a Variation?
City Nomad
Me go a Granny Yard
Song of the Sea and People
Jamaican Song
Bye Now
Goodbye Now
Pods Pop and Grin
Hurricane
Workings of the Wind
Light Fabric
Jamaican Caribbean Proverbs
Isn’t My Name Magical? Happenings
Doesn’t a Difference Make You Talk?
Isn’t My Name Magical?
Dreena’s Picture that Makes People Laugh
Sister and Brother
Delroy the Skateboard Roller
Occasion
Playing a Dazzler Childhood Tracks
This Carry-on of Two Boys Over Kim
Playing a Dazzler
Thinking Back on Yard Time
Children’s Voices
Night Comes Too Soon
Absent Player
Sharing is an Open Game
Haiku Moments: 1
Ritual Sun Dance
Thatch Palms
Look, No Hands
Rain Friend
Goodmornin Brother Rasta
Watching a Dancer
Village Man Hot News
Nana Krishie the Midwife
Everywhere Faces Everywhere
Haiku Moments: 2
Trap of a Clash
Child-body Starving Story
Granny Begs Daughter Janie
Okay, Brown Girl, Okay
Other Side of Town
Innercity Youth Walks and Talks
Song of White-People Ghosts
Trick a Duppy
Haiku Moments: 3
Love is Like Vessel
A Nest Full of Stars Not One Weak Day
Sometimes
Big Page Writer
Sly Force Waiting
The Adding Up of Birthdays
Somewhere! Somewhere!
Fireworks
At the Showing-off Event
People Equal
Wild Whistling Woman
Skeleton Sisters
Gobble-Gobble Rap
The Quarrel
Together
Singing with Recordings
Ball Gone Dialogue for Five
Right Mix Like Water
Eyes on the Time
Going Away Haiku
Postcard Poem: Solo
from My Sister’s Secret Notebook: Earthworm and Fish
Seashell
Trapped
Thinking Before I Sleep
Taking Action
A Nest Full of Stars
Caribbean Playground Song
Smooth Skippin
Old Man Called ‘Arawak’
He Loved Overripe Fruits
Queen and King Mullets
Doubtful Sayings
Duppy Dance
Getting Bigger Rap
Woods Whisperings
Granddad’s Visitor
Mister-ry
New Poems Top Footballer Rap
Looking at the Painting: ‘Fin d’Arabesque’ by Edgar Degas
Love of Love
Longings
Earth and Beyond
Two Stories
Draped With Water
Anancy John-Canoo Song
Index of First Lines
About the Author
Foreword
Think of James Berry as a 3-D person. For his open-hearted embracing of difference, diversity, and discovery, that inform the DNA of his poetic output and philosophy of life. To arrive at this state of being is almost a gift of grace and reflects the fluid chemistry of love.
Having lived in the USA in the 1940s, before settling in Britain in 1948, he experienced first-hand how minds historically moulded by racism and stereotypes can have a closed view of the world – and indeed of human interactions.
But James Berry has always refused to fall into the simplistic trap of reducing the complexity of human beings to their race, gender, or cultural background. In his own words, we must learn not to fear what is unlike ourselves to avoid remaining in a state of immaturity.
Taking his cue from nature, he finds inspiration in the “difference and variety of our human family”. In the poem ‘What do we do with a variation’, he puts forward the challenging question:
“What do we do with a difference?
Do we communicate to it?
Let application acknowledge it?
For barriers to fall down?”
The reader can feel the overflow of tenderness. Whether in cheekily affectionate letters scribbled by pets to their owners (in this case a pig):
“I want us to walk to dig together,
wallow together and share
one bath. I want us to walk
together, all muddy and smart”
Or in the recollection of a grandmother’s toothless kisses:
“Toothless, she kisses
with fleshy lips
rounded, like mouth
of a bottle, all wet”
This generosity of spirit can be felt even when moments of alienation set in and threaten to engulf one’s self-worth. For example, a black teenager in a new place gives a celebratory response to cross-cultural identity:
“Using what time tucked in me, I see
my body pops with dance.
Streets break out in carnival.
Rooms echo my voice. I see
I was not a migrant bird.
I am a transplanted sapling, here blossoming”
In his contact with young people, reading his poetry and giving workshops, James would draw inspiration from the new generation rap genre. But James also draws on the orality of Jamaican proverbs, school-yard chants, the call-and-response of work songs which energize his work with a musicality. Note the distinctive colouration of so-called standard English with cadences from his Caribbean creole word-hoard. What he often refers to as roots language, roots speech, roots voice.
This collection vibrantly demonstrates poetry as verbal music that stirs wide human connections.
Echoing the title of this collection, ‘Only one of me’, it would be equally true to say of James Berry, the poet and person – Only one of he.
John Agard
Introduction
This book is a mixture of all the books of poems I have written for children. It is great to see poems from these different sources brought together in one big selection. I am asking you to have a look and see what catches your eye and perhaps even stirs your feelings.
I will tell you that when I went to my village school in Jamaica, West Indies, in the 1930s, I liked poems. But all the poems we read and studied at school were about life in the United Kingdom. Now changes have happened. I would be very happy to know that poems here work to stir young people’s thoughts, feelings, activities and general experiences, in both the Caribbean and the UK particularly. Yet I also hope and believe, that because poems have a way of working in unexpected ways in the imagination, children from anywhere may well relate to poems here and share their varied stories.
Looking a bit into each section, I’ll pick out a few of my favourite poems.
In When I Dance, I have a great attachment to ‘Letter From Your Special Big Puppy Dog’. It always amuses me to think of an owner picking up this enthusiastic over-the-top letter from an affectionate puppy.
Have a look at ‘Happenings’ in Isn’t My Name Magical? It seems simple – ‘One thing happens/another thing happens . . .’ – but this way of noting builds up a picture that might make you laugh.
From Playing a Dazzler I’ll choose ‘Childhood Tracks’, a poem that is a series of pictures, sounds, tastes and smells that take me back to the Caribbean.
A Nest Full of Stars, my latest book, is full of favourites, but I’ll just pick out one popular poem, ‘Gobble-Gobble Rap’, a joyful celebration of the mouth and of eating. Do read this aloud in real rap fashion.
There are just four poems to give you a little flavour of the book. I leave you to enjoy all the rest.
James Berry
Seeing Granny
Toothless, she kisses
with fleshy lips
rounded, like mouth
of a bottle, all wet.
She bruises your face
almost, with two
&nb sp; loving tree-root hands.
She makes you sit, fixed.
She then stuffs you
with boiled pudding and lemonade.
She watches you feed
on her food. She milks
you dry of answers
about the goat she gave you.
Listn Big Brodda Dread, Na!
My sista is younga than me.
My sista outsmart five-foot-three.
My sista is own car repairer
and yu nah catch me doin judo with her.
I sey I wohn get a complex
I wohn get a complex
Then I see the muscles my sista flex.
My sista is tops at disco dance.
My sista is well into self-reliance.
My sista plays guitar and drums
and wahn see her knock back double rums.
I sey I wohn get a complex
I wohn get a complex
Then I see the muscles my sista flex.
My sista doesn mind smears of grease and dirt.
My sista’ll reduce yu with sheer muscle hurt.
My sista says no guy goin keep her phone-bound –
with own car mi sista is a wheel-hound.
I sey I wohn get a complex
I wohn get a complex
Then I see the muscles my sista flex.
Scribbled Notes Picked Up by Owners, and Rewritten because of bad grammar, bad spelling, bad writing
Letter signed – YOUR ONE
BABY-PERSON.
I know you like me
because you know I like to be tossed up
in the air and caught
and I know you’re best
at making laughs.
You know it’s great
when you coo and coo on me in smiles
with hugs and tickles and teases.
I rub my legs together.
I do my baby-dance on my back.
My fist hangs on your thumb.
I chuckle. I chuckle, saying
‘This face over me is great!’
I say GA, GA, and you know I say
Go-Ahead, Go-Ahead. Make
funny faces talk, sing,
tickle. Please. Make me chuckle
this time, next time,
every time. Now. Please.
A framed photograph of a baby.
A handwritten note.
A scribble made by a pencil.
Letter from YOUR SPeCiAl-BiG-pUPPy-DOg.
You know I’m so big
I’ll soon become a person.
You know I want to know more
of all that you know. Yet
you leave the house, so, so often.
And not one quarrel between us.
Why don’t you come home ten times
a day? Come tell me the way
your boss is bad? See me sit,
Listening, sad? And you know,
and I know, it’s best
when you first come in.
You call my name. And O
I go starry-eyed on you,
can’t stop wagging, jumping,
holding, licking your face,
saying, ‘D’you know – d’you know –
you’re quite, quite a dish!’
Come home – come call my name –
every time thirty minutes pass.
Letter from Your KitTeN-cAT-AlMoSt-BiG-CaT.
You tell me to clear up
the strings of wool off
the floor, just to see how
I slink out the door. But O
you’re my mum. Fifty times
big to climb on. You stroke
my back from head to tail.
You tickle my furry throat,
letting my claws needle your side,
and my teeth nibble your hand
till I go quiet. I purr.
I purr like a poor boy
snoring, after gift of a dinner.
I leap into your lap only
to start everything over.
From Your COloURfUl-GUiNea Pig.
You come to me. I shriek
to you, to let you know
I’m a found friend
you can depend on. I know
you long to learn my language.
You talk to me over
and over, in lots
of little words. I listen,
going still, with a quiet heart.
My eyes should go
all in a brighter shine.
Watch my eyes.
Listen to my shriek.
You’ll hear what I say.
Letter from YOuR RaBbIT.
To you, who belongs to me.
I listen. You know that.
Come see me. Now.
After. Soon. Later. Again.
All Time – talk
with same words you bring
on my face like daybreak
everyday. Stroke me like wind
passing. Then you’ve come
for heads to be lost together
in a hole in the ground,
in dreams about fields
grown and overgrown.
Watch my ears, you’ll see
I catch all you say.
Feel my eyes on you
and you’ll hear
‘I have space for you
to huddle, in my bed.’
Letter from YOUR horse.
Though I’m sort of high up and big
I don’t boast. I’m not snooty.
I don’t get easily cross.
When you come to me, come
with a long rope of talk
like I’m a soppy dog.
Stroke me with looks, voice,
hands, together saying,
‘Hello big fellow!
Handsome big fellow,
you’re a joy on the eye
with broad back under sky.
You’re swift like flits
of lightning lifts of feet,
but stand still
to listen to human parrot.’
You talk like that,
I nuzzle you.
Hear when I say,
‘Come walk with me,
clop-clopping,
with me, side by side.’
You see, I sign a letter myself PIg.
But O most of all
I want you to see
I want us to dig together,
wallow together and share
one bath. I want us to walk
together, all muddy and smart.
I want you to have
my work and my fun.
You give me food, you’re gone.
You forget and forget and forget
that if you scratch my back
or rub my belly on and on,
ever so weak I go.
I lie down. I stretch out.
I grunt. I grunt, saying
‘Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
Don’t you stop stroking.’
A Toast for Everybody Who is Growin
Somebody who is growin
is a girl or a boy –
I tell yu is a girl or a boy –
with hips gettn broader
than a lickle skirt
and shoulders gettn bigger
than a lickle shirt,
wantin six teachers
through the misery of maths
and one – only one –
who never ever get cross.
O, the coconut –
it come from so far
yu think it would-a get
hello, from a hazelnut.
Somebody who is growin
is a girl or a boy –
I tell yu is a girl or a boy –
who ride a bus to school
like an empty pocket fool
yet really well wantin
own, own-a, BMW
to cruise up West and North
and all around SW.
O, the pineapple –
it come from so far
yu think it would-a get
hello, from a apple.
Somebody who is growin
is a girl or a boy –
I tell yu is a girl or a boy –
who will never get rich
from a no-inflation boom,
will share no Dallas banquet
that come in own sitting room,
to keep a bodypopper
with a crummy-crummy supper.
O, yu think it would-a mek
a stone scream
rollin down a hill
jumpin in-a stream.
But, in spite of everythin,
everybody who’s growin
GO ON, nah! GO ON. Jus do that thing.
