There was a time when I tried not to know Mahadai Das. This was because after suffering a stroke, madness seemed to have entered her. She got the impression that I was in a position to publish her writings and make a lot of money for her. So he came looking for me in my office at the sugar company on the second floor of the Guyana Stores General Building. I was told and fled from my office. On one occasion he burst past the receptionist and came hammering at my office door. Security had to be called. It was very embarrassing, this young woman knocking on a Director’s door. Difficult to explain.
At an earlier period, I had met Mahadai a few times mostly with Arthur Seymour, to whom he presented her verse for scrutiny. She had great promise, he said. Then she had gone abroad to study and there she encountered a tragedy. Now she had returned. Her dark eyes were intense and angry. I remember I was in distress about it but felt I had to hide.
The main thing is that, in the suffering of her tragedy, Mahadai Das became a great poet. Her later work is, after Martin Carter’s poems, the largest body of Guyanese poetry. I feel my skin tingling when reading the last poems of Mahadai Das, a marvelous star of creativity before dark.
She broke her heart and raged her mind and out of this fire of desperation and fierce desire these passionate and persistent passages emerged. Here are a few of them drawn from a burning mind.
Tears
Dessert bones scatter on my plate
as they rain down the land.
how can i stop them? They are splatter
through my dreams leaving me homeless.
Oh God! I am naked as a newborn.
I beg you with my tears.
Monday, Come Fast
Come fast, Monday.
your flag in my heart bleeds
from the wind of his eyes.
Deep-flung, I drink turquoise
sudden pools of water.
I am a mermaid basking on the rock
from his glance.
Woman at sea, I am bound by a vine
on the rafts of his smile.
Rare teeth of the hours,
fast, sure, lurking sharks
under my bark.
Light shards from above.
The nights of his absence
seems distant.
Turn off the Darkness
Turn off the dark, sweet.
Address your smiles with his rosary
vehicles across my dark clouds,
I need your light, young one –
not a small star, some fading moon
nightly slicing in my air,
bet your entire golden coin
so I can spend it freely
Across the counter of love in your eyes.
I read them again with tears in my eyes. There are others, too – Learner; Ant and Eternity; Baby Bernini; The Leaf in his Ear; Lucky; The Coming of the Virgin; In The Clear Ballroom – where you can see her damaged but radiant mind unveiling itself in a rush of immortal nostalgia before oblivion. And the last of them all:
Return Me to the Fire
If I should ever die
Return me to the fire
If I should live again
return me to myself.
Heart fire,
flame in a hurricane-lamp
Outside, into this storm.