A Crossover Cry - The New Year 2025

Red over, red over, a desperate plea 

I yearn to transcend, but barriers decree 

"I want to pass," I cry, "I cannot stay!" 

Caught in the currents of the old regime's sway.

On the cusp of renewal, the waves crash and roar, 

The old order recedes, but lingers ashore. 

A breach in the dam, a vandal unseen, 

Attempts to derail, to steal what might have been.

"I want to pass," I plead, but the voice says, "No!"

"I am passing," I insist, with resolve aglow. 

What foe dares obstruct this destined ascent? 

Ten toes planted firm, on my future intent.

They creep and they steal, they lie and they bind,

A constant resistance, a torment of mind. 

But the trumpet of dawn, a clarion call rings, 

Arise, all ye souls, let your spirits take wings!

Like acrid smoke rising, a new force ascends, 

Heavy and hefty, where this smoke descends,

A surefire ignition, a light that will guide, 

As the swift wings of time, a new year will ride.

Dread shall consume those who fear the unknown, 

A heavy emptiness, a soul overthrown. 

Let this be your last sigh, your final lament, 

Embrace the new dawn, the year's grand ascent.

May the delights of 2025 unfold, 

The mysteries of your maker, a story untold. 

Hear the waves crash, against the rocky shore, 

But your soul is anchored, forevermore.

No more swept away, like leaves in the breeze, 

No more a whirlpool, lost in endless seas. 

This year, we ascend, we pass, we break free, 

By the grace of the architect, you and I shall be.

- cocoaTea.poetry

Frightened yet fruitfully flowing forward

Fruitfully forward

Forward, fruitfully

No fruit flies, freezer burn and fallout

No philanderers, frostbite and fleas

just...

Fruitfully forward and hopefully,

Forward...fruitfully

- cocoaTea.poetry

Poet Insight - Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips

Esther Phillips
Born 1950 in Barbados

Phillips’ work is characterized by its faith, a faith in her country, in the poet’s craft, and in ‘the master craftsman’ of Christian belief. 

As Jane King has said of her work in the Caribbean Review of Books, ‘God’s willingness is quietly present in a way that may be possible only in post-colonial spaces, now that the metropolitan academy has become so relentlessly post-Christian’. 

Yet Phillips is keen to stress the influence of what she terms Western Classical Literature, particularly on the technical craft and range of language in Shakespeare, Eliot, and Heaney.

Some Highlights 

• MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Miami,1999
• Alfred Boas Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets
• Frank Collymore Literary Endowment Award, 2001
• Appointed the first Poet Laureate of Barbados, 2018
• Sunday columnist of the Nation newspaper
• Editor of BIM Magazine
• Artistic Director of BIM Literary Festival & Book Fair
• Founder and Director of Writers Ink Inc. Barbados
• Creator and a senior consultant for the Bridgetown Literary Bus Tour 
• Host and producer of What’s That You’re Reading? (Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation Radio network)

Literary Works

• La Montee (University of West Indies Press, 1983)
• When Ground Doves Fly (Ian Randle Publishers, 2003)
• Poetas de Caribe anglophono (Casa de las Americas, 2011) 
• Give the Ball to the Poet (Cambridge-Homerton, 2014)
• Leaving Atlantis (Peepal Tree Press)
• The Stone Gatherer (Peepal Tree Press, 2009)
• Witness in Stone (Peepal Tree Press)

Sources
https://poetryarchive.org/poet/esther-phillips/
https://www.peepaltreepress.com/authors/esther-phillips

Memory - Esther Phillips

Memory

If sharing between two makes a memory complete,

what happens when one forgets,

and every Do you remember? is met with a blank look.

A shake of the head, No, I don’t remember.

I don’t remember at all.

Then it strikes you that you never really knew,

Could not have known, the exact map of his memories.

Their colours and contours, nuances, their proper indentations.

How long each stood in the queue waiting for his admittance.

So come, memories of mine, let me light candles and burn sweet incense for you.

Let me summon that day when, for the first time, we sat and talked until late in the evening.

It wasn’t so much what we said, but the way that trust, ever drawn by the open heart, Came in and settled itself in the room.

It was then I felt that whatever might come, I could find such moments again,

Or it would be worth the seeking.

Or the way he danced with three-year-old Zoë (not knowing I observed him),

But I saw how the tensions he had so carefully nurtured slipped for a while,

His face transformed by such delight, such gentleness!

I held that memory against the harsher times

When neither words nor silences could counter disillusionment, or

Calm the impatience with a world gone deaf to those ideals he had fought for all his life.

And how his voice could turn a lecture into a symphony!

His power of intellect, the elegant phrasing that rose or fell

on the under song of ocean tides, multi-tiered resonances, the soft swell of waves,

Water sifting through pebbles.

Where do I store a voice that caused the blood to leap inside the veins,

The mind to sound out depths I had hardly known,

The ear to hear how chords, captured within a phrase,

Could reinterpret meaning, spark illumination!

Now, I no longer ask, Do you remember...?

Esther Phillips

https://www.bimmag.org/stories/memory