self-portrait by shara mccallum (national poetry month #13)
Self-Portait by Shara McCallum
At this point, I don’t know what in me is Jamaican
versus American. Or, reaching further back,
Trinidadian, Venezuelan, African, Scottish, English ...
you get the drift. I thought every mickle mek a muckle
was from Kingston soil sprung, until in Edinburgh
I heard it in the mouth of a Scotsman. For years, I filed
my grandmother’s doudou as Patwa, failing to detect
Trini-French patois in her mongrel dialect.
How do you say aluminum or Armageddon? Ah, for me,
there interposes an extra syllable, an invisible I.
And why should any one I matter? is a fair question.
Only because the alternative is worse. And since
we’re on the topic of the singular, about this subject:
she is awfully tired of being parsed to see if she’s a fraud.
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