On the Threshold

On the Threshold is an anthology comprised of fifty poems in eleven sections. The poems in each section share a common theme. The motifs range from death (in "On the Threshold") to misery (in "Total Darkness in Daylight") to homelessness (in "Destiny’s Stepdaughter") to happiness (in "Moods") to economic reality (in "Sold out for a Green Card") to cruelty (in "Wounded Lioness") to pathos (in "Soul Stealer" and "Mother and Daughter") to prayer (in "Father and Daughter") to hilarity (in "The Ballad of the Mermaid") to parody (in "Snatcher of the Spry"). The four poems that comprise "Snatcher of the Spry" are parodies of these poems, respectively: “Coming thro’ the Rye” by Robert Burns, “Fair Liberty Was All His Cry” by Jonathan Swift, “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” by Richard Lovelace, and “She Walks in Beauty” by Lord Byron. Each section of this anthology begins with an epigraph.

The darker sections of this anthology are about my grandmothers. From childhood, my mother began telling me about their travails. She told me their stories repeatedly because she wanted me to write about them so they would never be forgotten. The remarkable thing about the lives of these women was the fatalism with which they accepted the injustices done to them. They both suffered from asthma. My paternal grandfather traded in his wife for her younger sister because in his ignorance, he believed that asthma was contagious. He took the second sister off to a distant island. My father and his mother were sent to live with her eldest brother. Three times daily, my father went with his calabash to collect their meals from relatives. When my grandmother died, my grandfather returned home and took my father. By then, he had two more sons. Throughout his life, my father lashed out at his aunt, who was twelve years old, when she was made to take her sister’s place. The trauma of witnessing his mother’s pain drove my father to drink himself into an early grave.

When my grandmother gave birth to my mother, rabies hit her father-in-law’s herd and killed more than fifty cattle. Her mother-in-law attributed this disaster to the daughter-in-law and her female newborn. She claimed that they were cursed. She forced her son to take his wife back to her family. They sailed overnight down the Demerara River to Georgetown on an open raft. My grandmother contracted pneumonia and had an intense battle with death. She recovered to the news that her husband had remarried. He never learned that she became asthmatic.

My grandmothers went to early graves. My mother lives with their heartache, and she passed this legacy to me. The fruits my grandmothers reaped from this world were bitter, but the pathos of their lives has mellowed into a sad beauty as the decades passed. May the poetry of their anguish bring you pleasure and a better understanding of the female condition.