A CALYPSO FOR BERNARD JULIEN

GKSammy - Poems

A CALYPSO FOR BERNARD JULIEN

In 2004, the "word on the street" is that West Indian Cricket is in crisis, and some question whether it will survive. Those of us who are older and greyer will recall that this is not the first crisis that our cricket has faced. It is well within living memory that we had West Indian and other Cricketers going to play in Apatheid South Africa in defiance of international condemnation. Under a flawed Glenneagles Agreement, each country was allowed to decide on the punishment of their own players, and the results were varied.

You serving a life ban

in your homeland

but look how the white man

is an honoured guest.

You can’t play here no more

- of that you can be sure –

so why not the same law

for all of the rest?

BJ boy, you got to realize

no amount of water in your eyes

going to make it right for you again.

BJ boy, your life gone down the drain.

Gooch was banned for three years, now he free.

You commit the same crime just like he.

So tell me how he could play right here

in your country? That could not be fair!

You must serve a life ban

in your home land

so we want the white man

to suffer the same.

Since you can’t play no more

- and of that we are sure –

let them face the same law.

Let them share the blame.

BJ it was wrong, this thing you do

but them English do the same thing too.

Now you second-class in your own land

just like any black South African.

Funny how the thing turn out to be,

BJ, but your have my sympathy.

Cause West Indian hands are just as tied

as the sufferers of apartheid –

long as we face life ban

in we homeland

same time as the white man

is an honoured guest,

and we can’t play no more

right here on we own shore

but it have a next law

for all of the rest.

Even though I am a Trinidadian, and I have been writing poetry for more than 40 years, I was never brave enough to write a calypso. The name on this poem came when a friend read it and decided that it was, in fact a calypso.