THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY
BC PIRES
A small tribute, in rhyme, to those who perished in 1990, in the forlorn hope we may have learned a lesson. We have not.
THIRTY YEARS plus one/ (lagniappe – or in the chamber?)/ Have we learned one thing at all/ from five days of blood & siege & danger / As a country, as a nation, as a group of firetrucking jokers/ Who say that wicked Hosay day changed a thing with power-brokers/
Thirty years (plus one, we doesn’t bother to remember)/ July 27 cyar hold an ember to 19th of November/ Opportunists seeking Michael-waves brought the people out (to loot)/ Fanned the flames to sack Queen Street and burn it down to boot/
And if you think it ent have Trini equality in troot/ Verily I say unto you/ You shall know them by their fruit/ Hi-Lo’s doors were broken down by white boys from Cascade/ Massy Days swiftly undone just like the underpaid/ And the churches, how they prayed/
(And the temples/ and the mosques/ and roadside pastors, too besides/ Sucking blood at ten per cent/ of the earnings of vampire brides)/ But 30 years (plus one) have passed to our shame/ And hardly that total amount/ Of people bowed heads at the eternal flame/
Looking back again, what was the firetrucking point?/ Burnin’, Catch a Fire, but no Confrontation, look now, just roll another joint/ If we can’t make it out of here with just a little push/ We will get by somehow (ie, with a gramme or two of cush)/
Rewind, press pause, advance, hold on, freeze-frame/ Mecca’d illusions revealed as just one more Trini game/ Play yourself, jump up and wine down low/ Now is Uzi diplomacy & SLR love that Trini know/
The only things we liberate through we Trini-style jihad/ Was murder, crime & home invasion good too bad/ The only thing the "Good Imam" spawned from his tenacity/ Is one criminal gang called “Muslims,” and a next one, “Rasta City”/
What did we gain from our week of bullet-backed invective?/ Nothing at all, it seems to me, except Freetown Collective/ Lou Lyons & the Mu (offspring of an upriser)/ To me (admittedly a fan), it’s really no surpriser/
that the son’s pop songs could greater change mindsets and attitudes/ than the dad’s million WWII bullets and pious platitudes/
What is it about ourselves as Trinidadians/ that make us fete-til-you-drop defenders and its guardians / What value do we place on ourselves and one another/ when, to date, we have not troubled ourselves to bother/ to count the dead/ and name them, too/ (Look, BC, don’t make me tell you ‘bout yuh mother)/
Raoul Pantin, poet, playwright, newspaper man and hero/ lined up for execution five times/ Lived on at less than zero/ In fragile hands and head he carried for long years/ For us, the cumulative effect of the 1990 tears/
You want to know what living here/ and dying really means? George Francis: driver; SRP George; MP Leo Des Vignes/ An eternal flame burns, yes/ for vagrants to roast pigeons/ 1990 corpses move/
