Marvin Thompson

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Cwmcarn

I lie outside
the glamping pod

in the scent
of dog rose

as starlings
rise and rise

into dusk’s reds.
The distant

sound
of a siren

seems as strange
as the caravan

I saw in a field
rusting

on last week’s
Blaen Bran

woodland walk.
Having read

twelve pages
of Maggie

Aderin Pocock’s
biography

to Derys and a now
snoring Hayden,

my gut
feels heavy

with guilt
for not finding

a book about
a Mixed-Race

scientist
for my

Mixed-Race
children.

The horizon’s
hills

are a patchwork
of mud;

to halt
disease,

150,000 larches
have been

felled. I imagine
the industrial

saws, the fumes,
the new

brambles’ fruit
(our fingers

will be stained
with our first

blackberrying).
I hear deer grunting

like the fenced deer
I used to visit

in Ally Pally
as a lonely

Year 7.
As the bucks ate,

I’d pretend
that if

I touched
their antlers

I’d assuage
my confusion:

born in London,
was I English

like school’s
niggers out

graffiti?
Did my parents

make me Jamaican?
Or was I,

by ancestry,
African?

In my mind,
the deer

multiply
and stand

in this clearing,
breath

to breath.
On my phone,

I re-watch
my favourite

cage fighter’s
throat-

choked
defeat. His tears

are the same tears
I swallowed

when a taxi driver
on a Kingston

roadside
branded me,

my parents,
my brothers

English.
Not Jamaican.

What if
Derys and Hayden

choose
to identify

as White
in a Britain

that will call them
Black.

The sky
darkens:

on YouTube,
I forego

Oliver Samuels
and belly laughs

to watch
the slowing

of seconds
as Les Twins

dance.

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MARVIN THOMPSON’s poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, Long Poem Magazine and the Primers 2 anthology. He won third place in the 2017 International Ambit Magazine Poetry Competition. Road Trip, his debut collection, will be published by Peepal Tree Press in 2020.