Alleyne’s poems online:
torchpoetry
kennesawreview
2river
banyanreview
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Photo Credit:Kevin Colton
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Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne
Love Poem With The Cane Fields (His)
After Cyrus Cassells
Here, Love, the world gives
us the definition of gift:
this embalming quiet
the taken-for-granted sky
the dismissed dirt
the underbrush of crawling things,
their industrious invisibility
this claustrophobic wealth
of ripening — its rustle and hum.
Come, Love, stay.
Love Poem With The Cane Fields (Hers)
Wherever you go, I shall go
Through these stalks,
slim in the earth as my hand
in yours.
Through the pungent mud
soiling our feet.
Through the leaves
their quills glistening like sweat.
Through our fraught waiting,
and waiting to be taken, to begin.
Here, you offer this:
the cut stalk,
the rust-speckled cutlass,
the resistant peel keened,
the oozing sweetness
ready for the mouth’s slow kiss
to begin, to begin.
It is not impossible to survive—
You have mastered solitude, struggled to unpack
the thick realities of time and matter. Love has flattened
you. Measured, you have faced your least loveliness.
How fragile God’s graffiti, the text of us scrawled
wild, twisted into this renegade, complex sentence
of living! How the making betrays and becomes us!
Look at the tree revise its body daily, spectacularly
rendered through the small violence of loss. If nothing
else, learn this: You are not broken, but rearranged.
