Jenny Mitchell

Heavy Dub

Jamaicans them is funny people;
give out nicknames like a real name is a coin:
could be stolen any time. Children were. Land. Religion.

Mummy says her Lloydie’s mind is taken up with slavery days.
Why, when he was born in England?

Doctors only had two words from him: Jungle Boy
like friends hailed out at school.

Couldn’t stand his given name: Lloyd Winston Campbell.
Cried when watching Roots. Where’s my Kunte Kinte?

Now in hospital, mummy slides her eyes away from him,
barely moving on the bed,
towards the red-skinned bitch,
holding hands with what could be his daughter,
orange ribbons in good hair.

They cling together as the nurse
checks on the tubes lodged down his throat.
Choking sound.
As a choir boy, he caused such gladness in the church.
Head thrown back. Buck teeth. A soaring voice.
Who will roll away the stone?

Tall for nine,
weighed down with Why did daddy have to leave?
as if a council flat could hold I must be free.

Jungle Boy would not be good for anyone.
Laughed too loud in class. Detained.
Forced to scrawl a hundred lines.
Mummy used a belt against bare legs.

Jungle Man or Natty Dread refused to find a job.
Studied books on slavery days, captive in a fog of spliff.
Called all white men Babylon.
Mummy kicked him out.
Had enough to deal with trapped all day behind a till.

Natty with his hair unwashed, moved in with the red-skinned girl.
She left when the baby came.
He inhaled his feelings with the skunk,
skanking in the street to heavy dub: loud,
insistent traffic noises;
shouting at the sky: I am a frangipani tree.

Sectioned. Cuffed.
Knee pressed in his lower back.
Released when lithium – that soothing punch – levelled him
like cutting down a tree to praise the stump.

Yesterday – grey beard, locs thin –
he balanced one foot off the curb.
No one heard him say: I’ll skank to my true Mother Country.
Driver only saw a flash.

Mummy hears her Lloydie gag.
Red-skin and her daughter wail.
Nurse pulls up the sheet, steps back.
Who will roll away the stone?

100 ways of saying black

Jenny Mitchell is joint winner of the Geoff Stevens’ Memorial Poetry Prize and a prize winner in the Ware Open and Segora poetry competitions. She was commended in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival First Pamphlet Competition; and has been highly commended and commended in various competitions. Her work has been broadcast on Radio 4 and BBC2; and published in several magazines, most recently The Rialto. She has poems forthcoming in The New European, and in parallel translation in the Italian publication Versodove. A debut collection Her Lost Language (Indigo Dreams, 2019) has just been published.