OLEANDER SESTINA

by Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming

Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming was born in Trinidad and lives in Nassau, Bahamas. An artist, poet, fiction writer as well as mechanical/building services engineer and part-time lecturer, she has published poetry in several magazines and anthologies in the Bahamas, the Caribbean and London. She won the David Hough Literary Prize from The Caribbean Writer (2001) and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association 2001 Short Story Competition. Her first book of poetry, Curry Flavour (2000) was published by Peepal Tree Press.

There were lots of ducks but no breadcrumbs
around the pond lined with oleander,
where we hunched against the drizzle,
past the strolling couple under the red
umbrella that had no seashore
use except maybe to fence in

or hide the copulating pair fenced-in
by inhibitions common as breadcrumbs,
unlike crabs mating on the seashore,
for whom death comes easily, like oleander
poisoning. Bees know to avoid these red
flowers left to fall like a drizzle

on the green salad earth, drizzled
with honey-lime dressing. Fencing,
chain-linked and metallic red,
environmental: rats can feed on breadcrumbs
poisoned with milk of oleander,
their bodies like flotsam on the seashore.

Beached whales and dolphins on the seashore
do not awake in a salty drizzle.
Mystery deaths might as well be oleander
poison from pink-flowered-green-leaved fencing,
hiding bodies scattered like breadcrumbs,
washed out to sea by a frothy red

tide exposing Bleeding Tooth red-
stained eye candy on the seashore.
Polyped seaweed like scattered breadcrumbs
on sand, pock-marked by a drizzle,
remnants of an ocean shower that fenced-in
blue-green lizards in an oleander

prison, like in the movie “White Oleander”.
The cell is liberating like the colour red,
a boldness that rejuvenates fenced-in
creativity, fresh like a seashore
breeze foreshadowing a cleansing drizzle,
splattering a canvas with painted breadcrumbs.

Life feeds us breadcrumbs, poisonous oleander
sprays in a drizzle of dangerous red
and a seashore imprisoned by fencing.