I am paused. Not from defeat, but because life has handed me a different kind of present one that asks for full-time responsibility to care, to notice, to be aware of someone else’s needs. In return, it has given me the quiet a sacred quiet to render my thoughts on paper, to find the words that give meaning to what I witness. This pause is not the absence of motion; it is the presence of reflection. It is a vantage point from which I can finally see the wider world in sharper detail, and name what is unfolding before us.
I have crossed the retirement bridge with a body that remembers every decade of strain and setback. Yet in this stillness my senses are brighter than ever. Thought runs hot; I write, I release, I refuse to go quiet. And it is from this sharpened place that I name a dread I did not invite: the Trumptonian fever maniacal, diabolical, billionaire-niche politics has wandered from cable news into my own yard, my own islands, Trinidad and Tobago.
We are not a chupid people. We are the Carnival tribe of the world engineers of joy, stewards of steel and song, diaspora minds stretching from Port of Spain to Port of Spain Avenue in Brooklyn. We prize our birthright of nationhood. So when a foreign warship noses into our port and the script says “routine,” we ask the unpolite question:
