Vanessa Richards MANNAFEST is the performance company of two London base performance poets, Khefri Riley and Vanessa Richards. Hailing from the West Coast, LA and Vancouver, they first started working together during 1994 in London to organise events for the seminal Black poetry group, Urban Poets Society (UPS). Riley, a founding member of UPS, helped cultivate the current renaissance of the Spoken Word. Open to poets, rappers, and anyone with Iyrical skills, these timely gatherings became forums of creative talent. Attracting three to four hundred people through word of mouth alone, these jams helped to establish the significance of the poets, and drew the attention of the media. "Vocal heroes..." The Face, November '95

Poems in this collection:

Shades of Nature Text Post Carlbbean Reds Text

Shades of Nature
 
Your skin is as deep
as midnight by the sea
and as silken as the breeze
that strips me of my grounding
to swirl In the whirlwind
of your blanketing blackness.
adrift but safe
in your hands.
I once loved a tree
because of it's shade
and the fruit that hung
from it's boughs.
I would cllmb and sing
through these brown branches
cradled to sleep
as I do with you now.
When my topaz shines
blushing gold and chrystaline.
I feel a solar arrow
swim warmly to my
chilled frontiers
dismantilng palaces
of frosted honey
to flow
at ease
and slowly with you.
If nature is perfect
then so too are we.
In our chestnut and pistachio shells
and every hue in between.
we are perfect, preclous
hueman beings.
 
 

Post Carlbbean Reds
 
I've become one of those transplanted tropical flowers
that withers In English cold.
Newly unaccustomed to a lifetime spent above the 54th parrallel
where the sky knows more shades of grey than blue, raln is never warm
and trees are evergreen.
A New World black soul that can't recall the reasons tor a big city
career.
Just give me soft water to bathe in, coconut water to drink in, sea water
to pray in.
I want to see sun resting on fertile hills while I'm swinging my skirts
to tempos of drum and steel.
I want to pull green oranges, custard apples and mangoes from the
trees
with cousin Jerry who has more fingers than teeth.
After the market we'll eat rice and beans
In a two room house filled with family, laughter and kerosene.
Tell me again Tante, tell me again
ot herbs, roots and hlstory.
Tell me again.
 
I disappeared in a warm breeze with a man made of clay.
Blue moonlight trails and candleflies led me away from the neonlights
I used to love
Yes, used to.   Past?   Tense.
Something in me shifted like a continent.
I started to feel the unfathomable, slowly pulllng a lassoed notion
Into the barn of the sacred cow, together nestling in virgin hay
till it was comfortable with the burn of the rope
and absolving the noose.
A crow flies backwards through the temple of my head
and I fear the flight will leave me gaping.
The knot between my brows is birthed out my mouth
in a chorus of moans and uttering wind chimes
that know not when to hush as the pain leaves.
Here's something the blues already knows.
I've found a third place to call home.
 
My father's godfather suffering with high pressure and redundancy
sits on his heart and watches Carnival on tv
Feiganing disdain but never changing the channel
complaining "they're dancing like Africans, those moves are for the
bedroom"
His wife fingers her rosary with arthritic hands,
snaps commands at the kitchen help
they can't
afford.
Bandits and God have the masses living in fear.
 
Mismanaged resources have made all that ain't free too dear.
So while I lime on the promenade in a state of bacchanal grace,
survivors rummage through the rubbish, hovering vulturine for my waste.
Carib returned, 20 cents a bottle ...
"Psssst    Reds,
God'll bless you on the other side.
On the other side Reds.
God bless you.
Bless you Reds" ...
 

Vanessa Richards