My Poetry Corner August 2024 features the poem “Work” from the poetry collection Sturge Town by Jamaica’s Poet Laureate Kwame Dawes, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2023). A writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays, Dawes was born in Ghana in 1962. When he was nine years old, he moved with his family to his father’s ancestral home of Jamaica. He became a naturalized citizen, having spent most of his childhood and early adult life in the Caribbean Island nation. Since then, he has lived most of his adult life in the United States.

In his poetry collection Sturge Town, the then sixty-year-old poet reflects on his journey from his childhood in Ghana, through Jamaica, and on to South Carolina and Nebraska in the United States. The eighty-six poems offer a compassionate insight into history and identity, triumph and loss, joy and grief, love and relationships.

I connected with his loss and own mortality expressed in the poem “Condolence” (p. 66): Thrice this week, I send condolences to acquaintances / whose intimacy has grown the more by empathy – we are of an age / of sudden deaths, or the prolonged and painful passing of loved ones. / It is fall, and I know that we are all, in our small boxes, / dreading the dusk, knowing that trees turning orange and crimson, / will be, for years to come, the way we see our losses, / our complicated loves…