Birdshooting Season
Birdshooting season the men
make marriages with their guns
My father’s house turns macho
as from far the hunters gather
All night long contentless women
stir their brews: hot coffee
chocolata, cerassie
wrap pone and tie-leaf
for tomorrow’s sport. Tonight
the men drink white rum neat.
In darkness shouldering
their packs, their guns, they leave
We stand quietly on the
doorstep shivering. Little boys
longing to grow up birdhunters too
Little girls whispering:
Fly Birds Fly.
Olive Senior
Yesterday would have been observed across the world as International Women’s Day, and poetry is always a willing vehicle in support of this. No doubt many verses through which various appropriate statements were made would have been invoked in rituals of different kinds. No doubt too, the dance halls around the Caribbean would have celebrated the emphatic sounds of indigenous musical forms such as chutney, soca and dance-hall itself, whose lyrics echoing into the early hours of this morning challenged feminist sentiments.
While these forms of Caribbean oral poetry are seen as promoting unwholesome images of women, they repeat a cycle of poetic forms through history from other parts of the world whose attitudes to women were often worse. The poetry of this region then, is part of a complex debate. But there are female poets whose work has advanced the frontiers of Caribbean poetry, and one of the directions in which they have taken it is to bring
