BM Revisited

BM Revisited Velma Pollard ". . . the head of the Lapith is in the Louvre and that of the Centaur in Athens . . ." —British Museum inscription* these fragments . . . how many spaces how many holes how headless must a greek his culture sell how threadless must he string from Athens and the Louvre to hulks of shapely beasts their erstwhile heads displaced where the imperial master minds insist on London as the centre . . . at home this woman sir, her great grandfather was Ashanti that man his great was han chinese uttar pradesh nurtured this great grandma and here the randy irish/english sired. empire fragments in marble as in men but here a patchwork quilt a vase from shards of ornate china aged in tier on tier of household waste folk dances where the afro rhythms answer euro names (quadrille, schottische.) our hodgepodge wholes a finer axis now on which to turn a place where to begin a better centre . . . Velma Pollard was born in Jamaica. Her books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction prose include Leaving Traces, Dread Talk: The Language of the Rastafari, Crown Point and Other Poems, Shame Trees Don't Grow Here, and Considering Woman. Karl, her novella, won the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1992. Footnote * Poem reprinted from Crown Point and Other Poems with permission of the author and Peepal Tree Press. The head of the Lapith is on the trunk of the Centaur

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Literature · Novella · Poetry · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History