3 poems by Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo

Profession

Annunciation hormone

‘relaxin’ what’s relaxing when

relaxin’ll reconfigure your bones

by unbinding all your sinews

throughout pregnancy never the same

rebinding never the same again

metanoia

child’s play to this

blue sky sky blue ripping

birther of nothing

I will pick up my sword

the one I gave away

Mother Francis

I swear by my chromosomes

I’ll be a decent brother xx

A Working Breakfast

Lydia’s tiger worms cohabit in relative silence:

nibbing, narrowing, rubbing, coalescing,

vermilion wormbodies, sometimes lone,

cohabit in peelings; tiger worms, unsleeping,

liquid wormets of hopes and tappings.

Kitchen digested to garden, horsemen redressed in a kilim,

worms’ undreamt audience dispensing endless blue-sky, endless

lavender, Iraqi figurative endless piece of birds –

The sea is warm, the earth is warm, the air bites its own tail,

n’a rien à dire, starts the infinite, applies day as a finish,

summer as a farmer’s dream – two peacocks fly away,

flying back multiplied –

friend, friend in relative silence,

pleasecomeflying. 

Youth

every each day best

bring up the girl without pink

says princess daddy

eat rhoticity chicken

resist transgressive dickery

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Vahni Anthony Ezekiel Capildeo FRSL is a Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction. Capildeo's eight books and nine pamphlets include Like a Tree Walking (Carcanet, 2021) and The Dusty Angel (Oystercatcher, 2021).

Profession' has previosuly been anthologized in print in Grandes in Casa, in English and Spanish