Dawad Philip

Gilded Carriage

(for George Floyd)

Ants, as the proverb said, did bring
the news where she lay: that soon
she would have company. He was 
coming to rest beside her; she had 
already been disturbed by his voice 
calling, Mama! Mama! Mama!

The Blond Conductor

On the train from St Petersburg to Riga, 
one night’s journey, the blond conductor comes
down the aisle with her silver pocket watch 
and a ticket punch. The voice of Joe Williams
filters from the speakers in the ceiling  
and the Basie band swings into the waiting night.
Because it is St Petersburg, my heart echoes Zhivago,
the doe-sad eyes of Omar Sharif as his train pulls away. 

The blond conductor has accused me of stealing 
a silver spoon from her tea service and billed me for 
the replacement. By morning, I find the teaspoon 
lodged between cushions, my Soviet souvenir. 

At the Hotel Riga, in Latvia, an island passport raises
alarm, the concierge back and forth nervously glancing
my way. I expect at any moment to see the conductor step 
from behind a curtain, her finger pointing straight at me: 
I am hoping there is an atlas somewhere, a magnifying glass 
to point -- see, right here! I am ushered up to the penthouse, 

everyone smiling as I go my way. The next morning, a class
of Latvian children gather in the lobby to meet the man 
from To-bah-go, the island where the Courlanders once ruled,
and bragged for a brief time. And I wonder what difference 
it would make if I rushed down to the station waving the spoon,
though I know the train and conductor are long gone.

Author of three volumes of poetry, Invocations 1980, A Mural by the Sea 2017 (City Twilight 2020), and Jayden and the King of the Brooklyn Carnival, (co-authored with Yolanda Lezama-Clark, 2019), Dawad Philip’s poems have appeared in anthologies including Steppingstones, Bomb, Caribbean Voices, Poetry International, past simple, Voicing Our Vision and New Rain. A recipient of New York State Fellowship on the Arts (Poetry), he has performed his works in the Caribbean, U.S., Canada; Riga, Latvia; Moscow and St. Petersburg. Philip keeps an active hand in the annual Trinidad Carnival and further afield as a costume designer and maskmaker. After living and working in Brooklyn for nearly four decades as a poet, journalist and artist, Philip has since resettled in his hometown of San Fernando, Trinidad. A Mural by the Sea (2018), a film by the late playwright/filmmaker Tony Hall, is based on selected poems from the book of the same title.