POEM: Poem for Walter Rodney, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, 1981

Editors, The Black Agenda Review

11 Jun 2025

“any where or world where there is love there is the sky and its blue free
where past means present struggle”

Walter Rodney, the Guyanese historian and Pan-African socialist revolutionary, was assassinated on June 13, 1980, forty-five years ago today. The Black world still mourns. Rodney is remembered for his pathbreaking historical scholarship on the African world, his reputation as a serious teacher, and his quiet but radical commitment to those sufferers and strugglers who have been pushed to the margins of the capitalist world, even though it was their labour that had built this world. After Rodney’s death, amidst the outpouring of grief, a rich archive of tributes emerged. Perhaps the most eloquent among them was a poem, written by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, the late Bajan poet, critic, and historian, who, like Rodney himself, deserves a hallowed space in Black heaven. To commemorate Rodney’s life and death, we reprint Kamau’s powerful, word-shattering “Poem for Walter Rodney” below.

POEM FOR WALTER RODNEY

Edward Kamau Brathwaite

to be blown into fragments: your flesh
like the islands that you loved
like the seawall that you wished to heal

bringing equal rights and justice to the brothers
a fearless cumfa mashramani to the sisters whispering their free/zon
that grandee nanne's histories be listened to with all their ancient fleches of respect

until they are the steps up the poor of the church
up from the floor of the hill/slide
until they become the roar of the nation

that fathers would at last settle into what they own
axe adze if not oil well: torch
light of mackenzie

that those who have all these generations
bitten us bare to the bone
gnawing our knuckles to the dead

price fix price rise rachman and rat/chet squeeze
how bread is hard to buy how rice is scarcer than the muddy water where it rides how bonny baby bellies grow doom laden dungeon grounded down to groaning in their hunger

grow wailer voiced and red eyed in their anger
that knocks against their xylophones of prison ribs and bars
that how we cannot take our wives or sweethearts or our children or our children's children

on a trip to kenya: watch
masai signal from their saffron shadow
the waterbuck and giraffe wheel round wrecked manyatta

while little blonder kinter who don't even care
a fart: for whom this is the one more yard
a flim: for whom this is the one more start

to colon to cortes to cecil rhodes
to whom this is the one more road
to the thathi headed waiter aban/

died out of his shit by his baas at the nairobi airport hotel

lets his face sulk into i soup
lets his hairshirt wrackle i sweat
cause i am wearing the tarn of i dream in i head

that these and those who fly still dread/er up the sky
vultures and hawks: eye
scarpering morgan the mi/ami mogul

those night beast a babylon who heiss us on sus

but that worst it is the blink
in iani own eye: the sun blott
ed out by paper a cane

fires vamp/ires a ink
wheels emp/ires a status quos status quos status crows
that tell a blood toll/ing in the ghetto

till these small miss/demeanours as you call them
be
come a monstrous fetter on the land that will not let us breed

until every chupse in the face of good morning
be
come one more coil one more spring one more no
thing to sing/about
be
come the boulder rising in the bleed

the shoulder nourishing the gun
the headlines screaming of the skrawl across the wall of surbiton of sheraton hotel
dat

POR CYAAAN TEK NO MOORE

and the babies and their mothers and their mothers and their mothers mothers
and their mothers mothers mothers mothers
perished forever in the semi-automatic catcalls of the orange heat
sizzle fear flare up of siren howl of the scorch wind wail through the rat-a-tat

of the hool through the tap of your head: damp: stench: criall: the well
of flame drilling aeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee through your flesh:
diiiiiiinaaaatat drrrrrrrrraaatat drrrraaataaatat tat tat tat taaaaaaat:

reduced to the time before green/bone
reduced to the .time before ash/skull
reduced to the time before love/was born

in your arms
before dawn was torn from your pillow
in your arms
before the tumours were crumpled into paper bags inside the star/broek market
in your arms
before the knife ran through the dark and locket steel was there between the spine and kidney

in your arms
in your arms
in your arms i prophesay

before you recognized the gorgon head inside the red eye of the walkie talkie

to be blown into fragments: your death
like the islands that you loved
like the seawall that you wished to heal

bringing equal rights and justice to the brothers
that children above all others would be like the sun/rise over the rupununi
over the hazy morne over kilimanjaro

any where or world where there is love there is the sky and its blue free
where past means present struggle
towards vlissengens where it may some day end

distant like powis on the essequibo
drifting like miracles or dream '
or like that lonely fishing engine slowly losing us its sound

but real like your wrist with its tick of blood over its man
akles of bone
but real like the long marches the court steps of trial

the sodden night journeys holed up in a different safe house every morning
and trying to guess from the heat of the hand
shake if stranger was stranger or cobra or friend

and the urgent steel of the kiskadee
glittering its qqurl
down the sharpest bend in the breeze and the leaves ticking

and learning to live with the smell of rum on the skull's
breath: his cigarette ash on the smudge
of your fingers his footsteps into your houses

and having to say it over and over and over again
with your soft ringing patience with your black
lash of wit: though the edges must have been curling with pain

but the certainty clearer and clearer and clearer again

that it must be too simple to hit/too hurt
not to remember

that it must hot become an easy slogan or target
too torn too defaced too devalued down in redemption market

that when men gather govern other manner
they should be honest in a world of hornets

that bleed into their heads like lice
corruption that cockroaches like a dirty kitchen sink

that politics should be like understanding of the floorboards of your house
swept clean each morning: built by hands that know the wind and tide and language
from the loops within the ridges of your footprints to the rusty tinnin fences of your yard

so that each man on his cramped restless island
on his backdam of land in forest clearing by the broeken river
where berbice struggles against slushy ground

takes up his bed and walks

in the power and the reggae of his soul/stice
from the crippled brambled pathways of his vision
to the certain limpen knowledge of his nam

this is the message that the dreadren will deliver
grounded with drift of mustard seed
that when he spoke the word was fluter on his breeze
since it was natural to him like the way he listened like the way he walked

one of those ital brothers who had grace

for being all these things and careful of it too
and careless of it too
he was cut down plantation cane because he dared to grow and growing/green
because he was that slender reed and there were machetes sharp enough to hasten

it and bleed: he was blown down
because his bridge from man to men meant doom to prisons of a world we never made
meant wracking out the weeds that kill our yampe vine
and so the bomb: fragmenting islands like the land

you loved letting back darkness in

but there are stars that burn that murders do not know
soft diamonds behind the blown to bits
that trackers could not find that bombers could not see
that scavengers will never bribe away

the caribbean bleeds near georgetown prison

a widow rushes out and hauls her children free

Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Poem for Walter Rodney,” Index on Censorship (1981), reprinted in the collection Elegguas (Wesleyan University Press, 2021).

Walter Rodney

poetry

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