My Poetry Corner November 2025 features the poem “The Day of Revolution” from the poetry collection My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982) by Guyanese poet and teacher Mahadai Das; included in the posthumous publication of her work (1976-1994) A Leaf in His Ears: Collected Poems by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2010). All excerpts of her poems are taken from the Peepal 2010 publication.

Born in 1954 in Eccles on the East Bank Demerara, Guyana, Mahadai’s father was a rice farmer. She attended the prestigious Bishops High School for girls in the capital, Georgetown, where she began writing poetry. Then in 1971, her mother died while giving birth to her tenth child, leaving Mahadai, then seventeen, with responsibility for her siblings. Later that year (November), she was crowned as the “Miss Diwali” beauty-queen. What a boost that must’ve been for the adolescent Mahadai!

In the early 1970s, while taking care of her siblings, Das earned her BA at the University of Guyana and became a volunteer member of the Guyana National Service.

Disillusioned with the corruption and authoritarianism of Burnham’s regime (1974-1985), she became involved with the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), co-founded by Walter Rodney (1942-1980), an African historian and political activist. In the poem “Militant” from her debut poetry collection I Want to be a Poetess of My People (1977), Das declares her commitment to joining the fight for change in Guyana (pp. 39-40):

Militant I am / Militantly I strive. / I want to march in my revolution, / I want to march with my brothers and sisters. / Revolution firing my song of freedom. / I want my blood to churn / Change! Change! Change!… // Child of the revolution! I want to grow… grow… grow! / I want to grow for my revolution. / I want to march for my country!

In her quest to grow professionally to better serve her country, Das left Guyana to obtain her MA at Columbia University, New York. After earning her MA, she began a doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, Illinois. While there, she became critically ill and never completed the program.

Das was living in the USA when Walter Rodney was assassinated on June 13, 1980. She laments and mourns his loss in the poem “For Walter Rodney & Other Victims,” published in her second collection My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982, pp. 54-55):

Tears fall / where I sit. / All the leaves of the trees are falling away: / naked stems stand alone; charred, / strung-out limbs / seeking to span the bitter wind that comes.

The revolution of the people died that day. Resistance to the authoritarian regime became even more dangerous. Though she felt safe from attack in the USA, Das avoided overt criticism of the regime in her 1982 poetry collection. Denise de Caires Narain Gurnah notes in the Introduction (pp. 15-16): “Exuberant “vision” is replaced by a guarded watchfulness and the poems become knotty, secretive and introspective with no clear sense of who is being addressed.”

The poetic persona in the title poem “My Finer Steel Will Grow” laments (p. 49): There is no place to rest / my accidental head. / It is a dog’s life. Today there are no bones…. Yet, hope lives that the day will come when the sun / will shine its brazen face / upon my heart, gone dark / like night and rotted blood…. / Whilst the hammering arm / in rhythmic falter flags, / my finer steel will grow. / My heaven. Such is the nature of resilience.

The poem “My Final Gift to Life” gives voice to the suffering of the people and lives already cut down by his rotting sceptre beaded / with murder in their struggle for freedom from tyranny. The murderous oppressor is not named (p. 53):

The night is pierced by strange cries of woe, / but he who stirs their tears / in the cauldron on his vanity, / preparing for a feast and a night of loud song, / little knows he of we who / sharpen our spears in night’s / naked hours. / Death be my final gift to life.

The Civil Rebellion of 1979-1980 ended prematurely with the assassination of the revolutionary opposition leader. In the featured poem “The Day of Revolution,” the poetic persona dreams of a renewed mass uprising against the authoritarian regime (p. 61):

I dreamt that the day of revolution would come;
that thousands would storm the city streets
screaming for justice.
Who can hold back the climbing sun in the sky?
Children hate the trapped darkness of the night.
Soon the crowd advanced and raised
a further cry.

Students skip classes to join their parents in the streets. Soldiers, ordered to hold back the protestors storming the presidential palace, refuse to turn their weapons on children. Instead, they came / bearing in the stems of their guns, flowers / for the children of freedom’s / new regiment.

The counterfeit general, left wingless
in the hostile air, clothed in the tarnished
brooches of his vanity, unprepared
for the sudden speech of freedom,
continued to spin his illusions
with the rotten yarn of his life.
Last night
I dreamed that the day of revolution would come.  

The revolution did not come as Das had dreamed. On August 6, 1985, the 62-year-old counterfeit general died of heart failure during a throat surgery. Years later, the Peaceful Revolution in the Soviet Eastern Bloc brought down the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, eventually leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 31, 1991. It’s no coincidence that Guyana’s authoritarian regime ended with free and fair elections in October 1992.

We the people of Earth are all connected through time and space.

Over the last decade of Das’ life, debilitating health problems curtailed her writing career. In April 2003, while in Barbados for medical treatment, she died of a heart attack. She was 49 years old.

To read the complete featured poem “The Day of Revolution” by Guyanese poet Mahadai Das, go to my Poetry Corner November 2025.