What I Know
Hannah Lowe

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always and is near.
I wake to sleep and keep my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

from ‘The Waking’ by Theodore Roethke

At night, you find me at the oil-lamp, dice in hand.
I say to myself, if I throw a pair of fives
I’ll give up this life – the hot slow days
of hurricanes, sweet reek of banana rot,
black fruit on the vine. I want another hand
of chances. I grip the dice and blow
a gust of luck into my fist. I’m dreaming
of England, yes, work, yes, women, riches.
I shake these bone cubes hard, let go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

The radio fizzes news across the tenement yard –
dazed soldiers sailing home, a weekend cavalcade,
monsoon time coming. I pass dead horses
in the field, dead mules. Men sag like slack suits
in the square. Talk of leaving starts like rain,
slow and spare, a rattle in a can. My tears
aren’t for the ship, new places, strange people,
but the loss of my always faces - I mean,
my people, who I know, my places. My sister says
you carry them with you, don’t fear.
What falls away is always, and is near.

The ship rocks steady across the ocean.
You ever look out to sea, and on every side
is sky and water, too much too blue?
Thoughts lap at me like waves against the bow,
not where am I, but why and who?
At night, we use our hours up, ten fellows
flocked to someone’s sticky room. I roll the dice
or deal for chemmy, brag, pontoon.
We go til dawn, a huddle at the lamp turned low.
I wake to sleep and keep my waking slow.

Some fellow swore there were diamonds
on these streets. Look hard enough in rain
you’ll see them. I squint my eyes but what I see
is sunshine on the dock, my sister’s white gloves
waving me goodbye. There’s no diamonds here,
or if there are, they’re under this skin of snow.
Seems the whole world’s gone white. I roll my dice
in basements below the English pavements.
I guess I’m learning what I need to know.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Hannah Lowe is a poet and prose writer. Her first full collection Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) is an elegy to her late father, Chick, a Chinese-black Jamaican immigrant, who earned his living as a card sharp. He was also a committed socialist who, in the 1950s, sold the Daily Worker outside Highgate Tube.

Well Versed is edited by Jody Porter. Read more here.
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