Welcome to Maggie Harris website

I come from

I come from borrowed names, given names, names of dis-possession
Hawker, Harris, Princess Margaret waving her white-gloved hand
from the motor cavalcade.
I come from faces, earth & sun faces, tamarind faces, watermelon teeth.
>From hands: rough carpenter’s hands, smooth Nivea-creamed hands, blue-veined & cutexed, hands that reached for the cane.
I come from skin & bone, Portuguese skin, African bones, buried in forgotten oceans

from the ringing of bells, the clapping of hands
from foreday morning drums over a Pentecostal backyard
from cutlasses and ships
from red bauxite pyramids of barges
from that name, Captain, cutting through those rivers
they charted, navigated, christened, ‘Home'

Havana
(from a sequence, 'Havana')

Havana
I had dreamed you
like so many others before me
and on that fast road from the airport

excitement fuelled my blood
as I imagine cocaine would,
diesel and dust and clapped-out cars

smoke-propelled and clanking exhausts,
were no match
for the clatter of my heart,

neither was your cracked face.

Plantation Children

when they took the first one she howled
her screams bowed the young cane leaves
twisted the green shoots
lifted its hungry roots

when they took the second, her cries
rose up to the clouds, woke Rainstorm *
from her slumber, brought
showers tumbling down

with the third her sobs rolled backwards
into her throat, drowned there
and by the fourth and fifth
her heart had become a stone

* an Amerindian creation mythological figure, said to be crying when it rains

Looking slantwise

Autumn, and the leaves are falling
like the head of my lover into my lap's
billowing fold of cotton.

This is the season for gathering
for storing and coddling, preserving;
for looking slantwise

at the underside of leaves
at shadows lengthening
like a cat in the sun.

It is a time for hands,
and a time for utterance,
for tracing the furrows of time

between frown lines, for watching
love shift like the scythe
from its resting place.

There is no pain

There is no pain
like the pain of daughters
leaving

especially in these barren times
of little or no ceremony

no betrothals, no fattened goat,
no head of cattle nor bridal tent
nor twenty-five carat worth of intention

the world steals them away bit by bit
teachers, friends and lovers
bearing them further and further away

from the Madonna of the afterbirth.

Seed

With my face into the pillow I feel you burst inside me
like a watermelon split by the force of the sun.

Words are strangled by cotton:
shower, cascade, rain, waterfall
sweat;
seeds swim upstream through every rivulet, ripple, contraction
spasm of muscle, thigh tidal channel
O God O God O God

They are entering each fissure, each crevice
each cell, each corpuscle.
They are singing war-songs as they swim:
somgs of home and country, motherlands and fatherlands;
there are no orphans here, no adoptees,
this is their country: me.

Maggie Harris