Cantankerous Rex
I wrote this poem inspired from a thread on Twitter I saw not long back all about the language Caribbean people use, something I have oft seen in members of the Windrush.
You know your conversationalist
is a West Indian when they sit
mugging the Queen’s English
growing up I recall
my grandmother and her friends
proclaiming Will Shakespeare “a jobsworth”
you know them ladies
with their diddly hands
like a cantankerous rex in the front room
instead of calling us kids rude
they would call us “boisterous youths”
or “rascals.” Women with names
like Phyllis that’d say
“I’m jos going out to the veranda”
using words like finicky
as she plays with her needle and thread
labelling her niece, a “craven buzzard”
for taking the last piece of plantain
like “highfalutin rapscallions”
“Chil’, you’re too fresh”
and in the next breath
they would engage in discourse
about their daily conundrums
like the discombobulated
headteacher at their grandchild’s school
the Windrush love words
especially the women, see them
gallivanting off into the English dictionary
in the doctrines of Charlie Dickens and Jane Austen
with incredulous syntax, sentence construction
words slammed like dominoes
and the flow of Dunn River syllables
liable only to other West Indian women
skylarking with Oxford and Cambridge
telling the pickney dem to stop running truant
using the quarrelsome coloniser’s tongue
to poet slam Jack and Jill Union’s posterior
the Windrush were born poets
watch their words go boom on Mayfair
what a palaver! A calamity like no other
