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Poem of the week: If I Were to Meet by Grace Nichols

<span>Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer</span>
Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

If I Were to Meet

If I were to meet the ghost
of my childhood running
with slipping shoulder-straps
and half-plaited hair
beside a brown expanse
of memorising water
and the mellow faces of wooden houses
half-hidden by a weave
of coconut, mango, guenip trees

I would say this was her childscape
this was where she was shaped
like first words formed on slate –

A raw and lyrical landscape
that witnessed her carelessness
of death, her fall from tree,
her near muddy-pool drowning
and how nothing seemed
to separate her from anything –
Not from the equatorial sun or sailing moon
or shooting stars of black tadpoles –

If I were to meet the ghost
of my childhood –
I would kneel beside her for a while –
this slip of a brown girl gazing at fish shapes
under brown sunlit water –
patwa, sunfish, butterfish –
mesmerised by their movement
and the silent scales of their music.

Then I’d straighten up
leaving her in her elementary world,
her bright aloneness. Oblivious of me.

This week’s poem marks a return to the work of Grace Nichols with a reflection that itself accomplishes a return. It’s from her ninth collection, Passport to Here and There, in which the major theme is a return visit to the country she left at the age of 27, Guyana. She explains in the introduction that, on a recent visit to Georgetown, entering the country from an airport with which she was unfamiliar, Ogle, instead of the main airport at Timehri, refreshed her perspective. “It was like seeing the city of my girlhood for the very first time.”

Nichols spent her first eight years in the coastal village of Stanleyville, and it seems to be this smaller child we meet in the sea-washed imagery of the poem. Her opening stanza acknowledges the imaginary nature of the encounter: the speaker is not imagining a magic-realist meeting with her child self, but “the ghost / of my childhood”.

Related: Poem of the week: Weeping Woman by Grace Nichols

The figure is seen running through the landscape, blended into the gentle “weave” of vegetation and the “brown expanse” of the water itself. The landscape is benign: the wooden houses have “mellow faces”, the trees specified (“coconut, mango, guenip”) are sources of nourishment.

Is there almost a suggestion that the child’s image has been formed out of the “memorising water”? The adjective “memorising” is surprising and evocative. It acquires a visual dimension in this context: water reflects and appears to keep in shadowy form what it reflects. Yet the poem brings the child very much alive – casually untidy, investigating her world, intent on her own concerns. The poem might be unfolding a scene in which it will be revealed that the real person and the ghost have changed roles.

The conjecture, “If I were to meet …”, leads the reader to expect an encounter. But it’s resolved, at first, in a low-key, introspective manner: “I would say this was her childscape / this was where she was shaped / like first words formed on slate”. The formation of the child is seen in terms of language, written words formed on that ancient, elemental medium, slate. Delicate end-rhymes in these three lines evoke the soft, fading imprints left on wet mud. The images intensify the picture of the child in her original setting with a small myth of origins.

Now the speaker steps back to take the broader view of a “raw and lyrical landscape”. Her own memory adds realist detail, describing the various dangers encountered by the child, but bringing these stories, too, into a mythic frame: “Nothing seemed to separate her from anything.” The child’s perception seems to be encapsulated in the image of “the shooting stars of black tadpoles” in the cosmological triad of the risks to which she’s immune. The “equatorial sun” could really be dangerous, the “sailing moon” might have various magical implications, and/or evoke the end of childhood. Adults would be aware of these things. But the reference to the tadpoles seems to illustrate a strand from the child’s own creative storytelling.

After the expanded narrative of these lines, the focus of the speaker and child fuse. The poem repeats its opening conjecture, “If I were to meet the ghost / of my childhood” and this time, it results in a closer physical encounter: “I would kneel beside her for a while.” Nothing is said: the speaker simply shares the young girl’s observation of “fish-shapes” as, like mother and child, both look silently down at the “patwa, sunfish, butterfish – / mesmerised by their movement / and the silent scales of their music”. This habit of intense looking unites the poet and the child across time and space.

The echo of “mesmerising” with the early “memorising” and the poetic pun on “scales” are touches of deliberately visible artistry that blend the poet’s identity into the texture.

The final action the narrator imagines is beautifully undramatic. The future self retreats, a kindly, sensitive, adult ghost that knows its place and refuses to intrude the complications of experience into the happily absorbed consciousness of the child.

This poem is from the first section of Passports to Here and There, Rites of Passage. It’s the prelude to a rich variety of further explorations by an imagination that travels freely and generously across the borders of place and time.