(Amaranthus tricolor)
six white eggs
in a pair of brown hands
across a garden wall
our Barbadian neighbour
smiling welcome
the day we moved in
in their little yard
his hens pranced and pecked
around a strange plant
Callaloo, he said
we brought it with us
all those years ago
head of a Taíno king
crowned with jade
long oval leaves
stained and veined
crimson and gold
plumes and tassels of flower and seed
it migrated over the wall
and grew in our garden too
its taste spicy as the scent
of earth baked, earth slaked
two minutes after
tropical cloudburst’s end
dauntless, it survived
East Anglia’s pitiless easterlies
how it adapted
and how we depended on it
when we ran out of
more homely greens
it gave us food
our Caribbean
callaloo
Header photograph © Chris Nielsen.
Mandy Macdonald is an Australian writer and musician living in Aberdeen, Scotland, trying to make sense of the 21st and earlier centuries. Her poems have appeared in anthologies such as Noon (Arachne, 2019), Multiverse (Shoreline of Infinity, 2019), and Aiblins: New Scottish Political Writing (Luath, 2017), and in many print and online journals, mot recently The Curlew (Spring 2019) and The Poet’s Republic (issue 7, 2019). Mandy writes in the strong hope that poetry can change the world, even just a little. When not writing, she makes music.
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