SINCE EARLY February, the words of celebrated Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison have been part of a project to warm the spirits of travellers on the London Underground.
Her poem I Am Becoming My Mother is one of five that have been on display in the England capital's 2,000 tube carriages since Monday, February 2.
They will stay there until the end of March, as part of the annual 'Poems on the Underground' project aimed at lifting the winter gloom of commuters. I Am Becoming My Mother should warm quite a few hearts, as it reads:
Yellow/brown woman
Fingers smelling always of onions
My mother raises rare blooms and waters them with tea
Her birth waters sang like rivers
My mother is now me
My mother had a linen dress
The colour of the sky
And stored lace and damask tablecloths
To pull shame out of her eye.
I am becoming my mother
Brown/yellow woman
Fingers smelling Always of onions.
The four other poems included in the project this year are John Clare's Emmomsail's Heath in Winter, Nobel Laureate W.B. Yeats' The Lake Isle of Innisfree, A.C. Jacobs' Spring and WS Merwin's Separation.
The 'Poems on the Underground' project was introduced in 1986, which is the same year that Ms. Goodison won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for North and South America, as awarded by the Booklist Magazine. It is also the year that the collection bearing the title of the poem selected for 'Poems on the Underground' came out.
Her sixth and most recent collection of poetry, To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, was awarded a gold star by Booklist as well. Her first, Tamarind Season, was published in 1980.
Lorna Goodison is the recipient of the Musgrave Gold Medal from the Institute of Jamaica. She currently teaches Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in the United States.
The project is not finished when the poems care removed from the tube carriages. The anthology, Poems on the Underground, published by Cassell, is now in its 10th edition and has sold more than 250,000 copies since it first appeared as 100 Poems on the Underground in 1991.
The latest edition includes more than 300 poems.
