KENDEL HIPPOLYTE

Love dissolves all

Love dissolves all –  slights, resentments, great historical injustices –
in the salt sea of itself.
It swallows improbabilities for its daily sustenance.
Love flourishes most in rank impossibilities, its flowers dare you.
Its original seed is a shape and colour that cannot be.
Love does not negotiate with you, holds out no wistful hope,
no exquisite petals of a happy ending, no lavender.
Sometimes its taste is aloe.
Then how and when and why is Love
Love?
No matter how dishwashing ordinary, kitchen cloth cliché the word ‘Love’ is,
how flapping-limp the sound of it becomes,
Love itself couldn’t care less.
It sips the arsenic of cynicism and leaves nectar in the glass.
Love trusts you to be defiant,
to naturally not recognize No, though you may notice it.
Love trusts you
to stumble-fall-crawl towards it
in the absence of any logical, incontrovertible evidence of its existence.
Love trusts you
to stand eventually in certainty, blind,
and walk
and find it.

Their voyaging

Love, as they grow old, reveals
it really had been love
guiding their hands into the shaping of small gestures:

she, soothing caramelised onion onto a slice of bread;
aligning the careful wedges of cheese, attentively;
offering the open sandwich into the reddening toaster oven;
lifting it out; placing it, morning-quiet,
on the table mat in front of him

he, lifting off the book that had dropped, covers upward,
splayed on the breast of the woman sleeping;
bookmarking the page; turning, till it clicks,
the knob of the bedside lamp; pausing a moment
to be sure to not wake her in the breath-held dimness

before returning to their wide-beamed wooden bed, waiting
to embark on the next passage of their voyaging
into the gentle dark

Kendel Hippolyte is a poet, playwright and director and sporadic researcher into areas of Saint Lucian and Caribbean arts and culture. A retired lecturer in literature and theatre, he is a poet and dramatist. His poetry has been published internationally in journals, anthologies and seven volumes between 1980 and 2019. His writing explores the spectrum of Standard and Caribbean English, working with traditional forms, free verse and forms influenced by popular culture. He is the winner of the 2013 Bocas Festival Poetry Prize. He has performed his work in the Caribbean, Europe and America at literary festivals and events. He has taught poetry workshops in formal and informal contexts for various groups and has edited six anthologies of poetry, including poetry from students of creative writing courses that he taught. He has been a judge on panels for the Small Axe Poetry Prize, the Bocas Festival Poetry Prize and the Montreal Poetry Prize, among others. His plays have been performed locally and regionally and three of his plays have been published in drama anthologies. He is an original member of the CXC Theatre Arts syllabus panel and is an external examiner. In 2000, Kendel was awarded the St. Lucia Medal of Merit (Gold) for Contribution to the Arts. Recently retired from the Sir Arthur Lewis Community College, where he had taught Literature and Theatre, his present focus is to use his skills as a writer and dramatist to raise public awareness and contribute to active solutions of critical social issues.