Poetry Month 2012: Kirk Ramdath - babel death star

Kirk Ramdath is a Trinidad-born Calgary poet and author of Love in a Handful of Dust, published in 2011 by Frontenac House. Kirk also organizes poetry and music events in Calgary and is editor of Wax Poetry Magazine. Read it for free at http://kirkramdath.ca/wax/

Here is a short overview of Love in a Handful of Dust:

When Kirk Ramdath was a child, his mother came from Trinidad to Calgary to give her family a life of greater opportunity than the one she left behind. Love in a Handful of Dust, his first book, is in many ways the fulfillment of that opportunity. Though in its romance, it might seem to be far away from the conservative values of the world he came from, in its extended riffs on sex, politics, faith, on ecstasy – not the drug, but the feeling surging up from an excess of the sensual, the emotional, the poetic, it is, in many ways, a thank-you love poem to his mother, and a man’s understanding of the meaning of the women in his life.



babel death star

god deciphered the binary code for infinity and vanished
leaving us to quarrel
in this paradise of flesh and death
leaving us to shoot bullets into the sky

chalk outlines
formulas upon a blackboard
instantaneous death
in a series of equations

peel back the skin of the earth
the soft parts are eaten
by time and worms
nothing remains but bones

bridges of imagination
last longer than bridges of stone
but even they will crumble
and be washed out to sea

elsewhere, herds of caribou flee
crows scatter with plans to return
but one day they will do as the buffalo have done
they will flee the earth
as breath flees the body
until not even bones remain