A friend of mine, who knows I love Martin Carter, alerted me to a recent letter in the press by Ruel Johnson that contained a poem by Martin apparently written in the dark days of our suspended constitution. It was a riveting piece entitled ‘Not I With This Torn Shirt’ and one verse went, “In the white dust and grey mud, I tell you and I tell no secret – now is the long past time for worship, long past time for kneeling.” I had not seen the poem before, and I read it several times. It is constructed on short powerful phrases with Martin’s distinctive rhythm – one of those that stops you in your tracks – and as we chatted about it my friend remarked that one could be excused for thinking the poem was written about Guyana now.
His comment struck me as another example of mankind’s tendency, caught up in the very troubling woes of today, to lose touch with those wretched earlier torments. As the years go by us, it is generally true that time heals the painful wounds of an earlier time; our memory of it goes behind some sort of therapeutic veil that softens both the incidents themselves and our recollection of them. The poem is startling.
Martin had this facility of the great writer to take a few simple words and create these
