The Healing Next Time

Roy McFarlane

• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781911027454
• eBook ISBN: 9781911027638
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Roy McFarlane 's second poetry collection, The Healing Next Time, is a timely and unparalleled book of interwoven sequences on institutional racism, deaths in custody and of a life story set against the ever-changing backdrop of Birmingham at the turn of the millennium. Here forms a potent and resolute narrative in lyrical and multidimensional poems which refuse to look the other way or accept the whitewashed version of events.

Courageous, rageful and mournful, these are poems of Black history and Black presence, poems of witness and poems of activism. McFarlane's intricate lines make record of injustice and mark the names of those who have lost their lives and dignity to prejudice and hatred. The Healing Next Time also asks vital questions of the future, and of the reader – and reminds us where the power to change things lies. It is also a poetry of personal discovery, of revelation and resilience – where the influence of Jazz and of James Baldwin infuse and shape this unique, remarkable book.

New Millennium Journal

Addressing our individual and collective suffering, we will find ways to heal and recover that can be sustained, that can endure from generation to generation.

bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

1999 – Parts of a broken man

the more a man has the more a man wants

—Paul Muldoon

i.

On Sunday, the preacher’s speaking of revelation and repentance,

the end of the world is on the lips of news reporters.

Cults are spreading and in the basement of a computer department

they’re preparing for the invasion of the millennium bug—

we watch for the skies and miss the stones at our feet.

*

The family man is shooting a basketball, graceful

in motion and everybody’s watching the flight of the ball

reaching its zenith, then beginning to fall. All things fall;

summer rain, falling from grace, the fallout

of a sordid affair; the ball’s falling.

*

Breadfruit, soursap, plantain. A Saturday morning ritual,

roles changed, the son takes his mother to a Caribbean stall

in Bilston market. She’s not as strong as she used to be,

her breathing laboured, but she snaps the heads, digs out the eyes,

yellow yam, sweet potato, dasheen.

*

A daughter will be born soon, an olive branch

for the family man treading water after storms ceased.

ii.

A nation hears no evil, sees no evil, speaks no evil. A son’s blood,

a father’s sweat and mother’s tears will lead a retired judge

and three diverse men to inquire in towns and cities

of the racism that kills. And the rocks will hear and rivers speak

of the death of Stephen Lawrence.

*

After hearing of the death of Grover Washington Jr,

the family man’s falling asleep with his Walkman headphones;

between winelight and come morning, memories are awakened,

whirl of cassette tapes beginning the rewind of illicit love:

just the two of us building castles in the sky.

*

Late meeting, lips kissing, hands feeling, fingers…

Her halter-neck top has been drawn over her head,

the night air touching her breasts, powdered

with a flurry of goosebumps, he’s sucking greedily

and it all begins again.

*

A mother’s sharing roast breadfruit, ackee and saltfish,

with a warning: please, set your house in order.

iii.

There are no purple skies but the prophet Prince lives

to see his words come alive, as people party like it’s 1999.

We could die any day. James Byrd Jr died the year before;

lynching-by-dragging, hate driving for miles in a pick-up-truck,

driving from century to century.

*

He’s speaking at public inquiries, tongue heavy with injustice,

teeth grinding to the sound of another death in custody.

There’s a bitter taste, he needs something sweet; later in a private place

her labia moistened by his tongue, she guides his erection deep

and voices are lost in each other’s mouths.

*

He’s singing gospels, praying repentance into the early morning,

following traditions from sunny islands, avoiding the tears

of his wife, who’s dreaming of impending sorrows. The millennium arrived

drunk with Hogmanay, midnight mass, Kwanzaa blessings

and Prince alighted from the heavens in a purple robe.

*

A new job, but the more a man has the more a man wants.

He leaves doors unclosed, doors that ache in the wind.

2000 – There are no gods in the midnight hour

i.

2,000 doves of peace released into the new millennium, holy doors opened,

a Pope in purple uncovers the sins of the Church, kneeling in mea culpa,

praying for forgiveness by the beating of his breast; it takes three priests

to open the doors of St Paul’s, so many doors to open, how many more

to begin a healing?

*

An out-of-town preacher draws a crowd and the family man’s watching

the fire and brimstone bubbling in the orator’s veins, the sweet by and by

sweating through his pores, as he looks them in the eye with hands raised high.

They’re all running to the altar, clothed in guilt, hoping for healing and saving

by touching the hem of his Armani.

*

A mother’s hands are over-ripened and seeping with eczema,

each finger bruised and darkened. The son takes cream and rubs

her hands; hands that worked hard, hands that scolded him

when needed, hands that took a hold of Jesus’ hands, hands full of sweet love.

Now he’s massaging her weary hands.

*

There are no gods in the midnight hour,

only porn and replays of Janet Jackson.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• New Millennium Journal
• …they killed them
• Gospel According to Rasta
• Notes
• Thanks and Acknowledgements
• About the author & this book
• About the author: