My First Poem: A Fable

The second form block was on the other side of the campus. At age eleven, you arrived at the new school in which the playing fields were green and cared for. There was even a stretch of ground called “Holy Ground” that was out of bounds for anyone but athletes and sportsmen waiting to play, and even then, only the older boys dared to step on Holy Ground. Holy Ground was on the more welcoming side of the school, the side where the First Form Block was. The first form rooms—four of them, were clustered around a late nineteenth century building of wide solid walls with only the latest layer of plaster covering the walls. The floors were wooden, with cracks and narrow crevices—there was no sheen on the floor, polishing had stopped years ago, now the floor was a dull stained stretch. First Form seemed safe in a school of boys as old as nineteen or twenty. The second form block was close to the Third Form and the Fourth Form cluster of buildings, some more modern than others.

My classroom was a dark, cool room at the inside of the elbow of a strip of classrooms. The floor was a greenish grey stretch of smooth concrete, so smooth that when wet, we could skid around as if we were skaters. This area of the school never felt safe. We were so far from the administration building, the Simms Building—that old nineteenth century monolith where the teachers stayed. From the wide porch of the Simms Building it was impossible to see the Second Form Block—anything could happen there. Boys fought in the stony courtyard, boys bullied boys, boys demanded money from boys, boys teased boys, boys decided to try out being men in that area. And during the seventies, during the years when the school, once an elite bastion of the brown and white skinned Jamaican middle and upper classes, had began to accept boys from all backgrounds in the spirit of socialism and free education. I was one of that generation, and we arrived and took over the school like reggae was taking over Jamaica. We knew that things were changing, but they were changing slowly. Our teachers were no longer called Masters, but many of them were Old Boys in the tradition of the school. They had been students in the school years before and they carried in them the long legacy and tradition of the old days. We were caught between these worlds.
It was 1974, I was in Second Form, I was a round faced, constantly laughing boy who loved cricket, loved drawing, and felt good about being at this school. My father had gone there thirty years before, my older brother was getting ready to leave and I was now there. I was twelve when I wrote my first poem.
One imagines that this is how an essay on the beginning of my poetic career should start. The next scene would be of me loitering at the school until dusk, perhaps to watch the older boys on the senior cricket team practice, and then, alone in the middle of the field, I looked at the sky, thought of the startling beauty of a Jamaican sunset, and began to weep at the largeness of the world. And in that moment, I knew I would be a poet, and that my mission would be to make poems to respond to the passionate grace of the moment. That would be Walcott’s story, not mine. I did stay late, mostly to watch the women sprinters of the Jamaican Olympics team doing their workouts on the school field, mostly to watch their bodies, mostly to be amazed at the power and beauty in their bodies. If I wept it would have been because some boy used a bag and walloped me in the stomach, winding me because of some smart-ass remark I might have made about his terrible afro. I never wanted to be a writer. Not then. Not for years to come.
But I did write a poem when I was twelve and in second form. Like most children in school in America who write poems, I wrote my first poem because the teacher asked us to write a poem. The teacher was Dennis Scott, a gifted Jamaican poet, playwright and dancer. He said we should write a poem. So I wrote a poem about eating a mango. I liked my poem about eating a mango. I did because I liked to eat mangoes. At that time, I liked eating, I liked girls, I liked drawing, I liked writing letters to penpals, and I liked cricket. So I wrote about mangoes. And the only idea that stays with me about the poem is that I wrote about licking the drip of juice as it trailed down my arm. Dennis Scott thought it was a good poem.
So much so that sometime later, at one of those parent teachers meetings, which I don’t remember my parents ever attending, except this one, of course, he approached my father, who he must have known, and told him about my poem. I think he showed my father the poem. We were in the large cement walled cafeteria which served as our auditorium as well. A series of sliding doors tinted the navy blue of our school colors and emblazoned with the preening dragon of our coat of arms, were all badly damaged, the glass broken in parts. The auditorium had a look of benign neglect and use. In that hall, he told my parents that I had written a good poem. I think I was a little embarrassed by the act—by the telling. But I don’t think embarrassment was everything I felt. Mostly, I felt deflated. The poem was my thing, a kind of school boy triumph, a success that had impressed my friends, but now it was somehow taken from that secret place. I realize, now, that I liked to hoard my experiences, to carry out a life that had some separation from my other world, my home world. It felt as if the strange sense of independence that had come from moving from First Form to Second Form was being taken away by the nods and chuckles of this man and my father.
So I did not write another poem. That was my first poem.
My second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth poems all happened four or five years later during the last two years of that high school experience. Then I wrote with other boys, imitations of Gerad Manley Hopkin’s poems. We worked in secret. By then I had my world all sewn up, I controlled it. Those imitation poems were not brilliant, they felt like doing crossword puzzles, attempts to break some code of language. I was not good at this imitation, but I wrote with the others and we read the versions to each other.
This was in 1979, this was during the build up to one of the most violent elections in Jamaican history. It was long after I had had sex for the first time. It was when I was a legitimate athlete, having played cricket for my school, having been selected for national trials for the national youth team. It was when I had a girlfriend. It was when I was sure I would be a lawyer. It was the same year that I really started to understand the genius of Bob Marley. Those poems had nothing to do with my world, but they would start something that would not stop. I continued to write poems because I was able to do so in secret. I was able to do so as someone who wanted to make words work for me.
There seems to be a contradiction here—that my art thrived when I enjoyed it as a secret, yet I have spent all these years making public this secret. But the contradiction is not such a strange one. I still see my writing of poems as a secret. I still enjoy the quiet place of wrestling alone to make words work on the page. I still feel deflated when I talk about a piece I am working on before I have taken it to the point of no return. Beyond this, I see no real connection between my first poem and my life as a poet today. Yet I have now made that story a part of the narrative of my art. It is a false narrative, a misleading narrative. But it has a quality of assurance that I think I enjoy and I suspect others enjoy.
My first poem was about a mango. I keep writing poems about mangoes. Does this, too, mean something?