Voices 1

Ashley R Cain
(23.11.83)
Listen My Brother
My Sister Listen!
Do you hear the sound passing through our lands?
Do you feel the winds blowing through our land
Trinidad, Grenada, St Vincent to Jamaica?
Do you hear the sound of a peoples struggle
for justice, for freedom, for peace?
I hear it in the street,
in the school,
in the hills.
See it in the faces of youth;
liming on the block with no work for their hands.
See it in youth who look to the future
resigned,
accepting an order they never created nor can destroy.
Do you hear it in the cries of babes for food?
or feel the mothers struggle to keep her family alive?
Can you understand the struggle
and aspirations of a people raised on hardship,
people with a spirit that cannot be crushed?
Yes!
I hear the cry of the Caribbean man
In the poets plaintive cry.
I hear him through the calypsonian's song,
from a man beating out his pain on pan
drowning his pain in rapturous rhythm
as bodies wind to the song in the street.
Pan men beating sweet and slow
amplifying our struggles as we grow,
voicing our hopes of liberation
playing our song of revolution,
calling the revolution in our land.
But Revolution is a movement
a progression,
that grows from a peoples'strength.
Revolution is a process, for oppressed man,
that springs from the purest love
and feeds on a peoples'dream.
Revolution is deeper than gunfire in the street,
1 Written at UWI St Augustine after the failure of the Grenadian Experiment in Alternative development. Many who speak
glibly on these issues today never understood what the social revolutions that were quite possible in the seventies and
eighties were all about. This poem captures in some small measure the motivation for a Grenadian Revolution and others
like that. This poem was written in response to an all too familiar situation across the Caribbean in 1983.
wider than intellectuals´ visions
larger than the politicians urge
to control
manipulate
oppress
and keep a people down.
Revolution is a realisation of a peoples´ power to be free
power to shape their own reality.
Do you hear the sound of freedom in the street?
Can you see our people rise as one?
I hear the voice of Revolution
passing through our lands.
Can I listen unmoved to voices too deep for words
unmoved by pain too deep for tears?