Launching Respair: The rain after drought

It’s crazy to think that it’s finally here🎊

My first book!

This is the result of many big feelings, much writing and the hand of the Lord (on my neck😅).

I present to you Respair: The rain after drought

What does Respair mean?

Its an old-timey word for fresh hope or recovery from despair. It is the opposite of despair and encourages optimism in the face of difficult times and moving beyond them.

Respair: The rain after drought is a poetry collection exploring spiritual transition, love for God, and personal journeys. It covers themes of creation, faith, overcoming challenges, and seeking spiritual purpose. As a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, I infuse my work with caribbean roots and peer at the complexities of the christian faith.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON➡️ https://a.co/d/co33ShT ✨($9.99 USD)

AVAILABLE LOCALLY➡️ https://forms.gle/DufCTTEseMYjGXJCA✨ ($70.00 TTD)

This book chronicles in poetry, my faith walk through hard times, battles with mental health, self discovery and finding purpose in God. This work was inspired by God and He penned it through my choppy prose and coskelle colloquialisms.

As you read, I pray that you feel seen, encouraged and take even greater courage in your own journey.

-Ayanna from CocoaTea Poetry🌱

Time bound

 My skin still stings 

from lessons learnt 

So bitter, I gag

All these years later

- CocoaTea.Poetry

One hand does slap

Hazardous is

The hand that sweetly caresses your face 

Comforting, is

the same hand that presses you down

-cocoatea.poetry

Own- Kendel Hippolyte

A road razzled with restaurant signs and menu boards,

lights twinkling in the eaves, winking a come-on at the tourists;

glimpses—between the tall hedges—of hotel staff, busy

in black and white, a slash of colour, slice of a smile;

the strip, a tourism hotspot, cools down in the evening,

 then flares up, a febrile condition, in the night.

i try to understand a whole economy based on fantasies—

beach umbrella, sipping a culture on the rocks, Stella’s groove—

and ponder: for some, in fact, we did begin as fantasies—Cipango, El Dorado—

then were traded down to sweating-stink, slave-holding colony.

So centuries later, on a tropical Friday night, what now? What?

You can’t dissolve history in a fruit punch, make it delish.

Even the sugar in the coffee has a bitter aftertaste

when you know. The charcoal briquettes make the barbecue

then become ash. You see it everywhere, in everything.

See what, though? What exactly do i see?

This hedged-in hotel, with a glance of bustling workers,

and built on the remains of what had been the village cemetery,

is locally owned. A Black industrious couple from industrious families

and captains now of the twinkling industry of fantasy.

No absentee plantation owner’s property, this—a native enterprise.

Why my disquiet, then? Skeletons under the tiled floors?

Gravestones and bones crunched in with the numbers?

Wincing, the thought of that but—no, what stabs the mind

is that the buried could not hold even that final patch of ground as theirs.

And their descendants hustling in the palace of fantasies above them

don’t own it—not even in fantasy.

And I’m thinking that what may finally resolve this history,

shred the black and white raiments it is clothed in,

is when they own

not only the hotel, its ground, the other ancestral grounds,

but also

their own history.

-Kendel Hippolyte

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