Maggie Harris was born in Guyana and emigrated to the UK in 1971. Her first collection Limbolands won the Guyana prize for Literature 2000. Her second collection From Berbice to Broadstairs was published in 2006. Her current work in progress, granted a bursary by Arts Council South-East, is a memoir of her childhood in the Caribbean. Maggie has tutored adults in Creative Writing for Kent University and has run numerous workshops for children and adults. Prose writing, essays, short stories & poems have been published by Virago, littleBrown, Wasafiri, Agenda, Equinox, The SHOp, Poetry Wales & Poetry News & others. She was also awarded the TS Eliot Prize, Kent University.

Quelle: poetry p f

Sonnet for a Portuguese Woman

You wouldn’t have cared about ships or seas, apart
from the cargo that mattered - New Zealand butter,
sardines, matches, kerosene.
Wartime children
were your concern - oil-slicked, sugary children,
nappy-headed, dust-kneed, forming a litany from
your mouthful of names: Angelina Carmelita Petronella
Machado. Mother.
Rosary blow-mouth full of incantation
and necessity, never speaking of that other harvest failing,
that buss-ass Madeira harvest
forcing farmers to become sailors and board ships
where crucifixes rusted on collar-salt bones.
No. Just gee-up that donkey-cart there and tell us tales
of a mer-woman washed up on some fresh-water creek in Demerara
with the know-how of transforming fins into feet.