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Quashie’s Verse But what now is the length of Quashie’s verse? He who can no longer measure by kend or by chamma or by ermijja; he who knew his poems by how they fit in earthenware, perfect as water, words shaping themselves against red clay grooves. And though no two jars were precisely like each other – it worked for Quashie – this ‘just about’ measure – for words are like that – each one carrying its own distance. Even this, despite its best shaping efforts, will never quite be a jar. So what now shall Quashie do – his old measures outlawed, and him instructed now in universal forms, perfected by universal men who look nothing and sound nothing like Quashie? 12
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Unsettled So consider an unsettled island. Inside – the unflattened and unsugared fields; inside – a tegareg sprawl of roots and canopies, inside – the tall sentries of bloodwood and yoke-wood and sweet-wood, of dog-wood, of bullet trees so hard they will one day splinter cutlasses, will one day swing low the carcasses of slaves; inside – a crawling brawl of vines, unseemly flowers that blossom from their spines; inside – the leh-guh orchids and labrishing hibiscuses that throw raucous syllables at crows whose heads are red as annattos; inside – malarial mosquitoes that rise from stagnant ponds; inside – a green humidity thick as mud; inside – the stinging spurge, the nightshades, the Madame Fates; inside – spiders, gnats and bees, wasps and lice and fleas; inside – the dengue, the hookworm, the heat and botheration; unchecked macka 13

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Quashie’s Verse

But what now is the length of Quashie’s verse? He who can no longer measure by kend or by chamma or by ermijja; he who knew his poems by how they fit in earthenware, perfect as water, words shaping themselves against red clay grooves. And though no two jars were precisely like each other – it worked for Quashie – this ‘just about’ measure – for words are like that – each one carrying its own distance. Even this, despite its best shaping efforts, will never quite be a jar. So what now shall Quashie do – his old measures outlawed, and him instructed now in universal forms, perfected by universal men who look nothing and sound nothing like Quashie?

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