Kendel Hippolyte

Mack 1 – McWanting

Language: english

Translations: german (Mack 1 – McHabgier)

Mack 1 – McWanting

What he’s most wanting is not what he wants
Is not what he craves
Deeper than avarice, if he’d let himself feel, is the haunting hunger
That saves

He holds the whole world with his hired hands
Desperately trying
To have it. But trapped in his spasming grip, his seizures, the earth
Is dying

He cannot stop grasping. Whatever he sees
He is accounting
Its self into cost into price into sale into profit into himself
McWanting

He gluts till he’s wracked with a spasm and spews
Blood-flecked bits of self
A wasting consumption leaving him gasping for life and clutching
At pelf

What is the deep whole he’s wanting to fill
For what is he hungry?
Gorged with the planet’s green flesh, its black bile, its ripped out entrails
And yet empty

Running to every thing and running everything
Avoiding the whole
He’s afraid that will swallow him into its void where he has no thing
No soul

And yet he touches us, Midas-like, desperately
Haunted and haunting
And we, his children, we bear his name like a watermark, secretly
McWanting

Kendel Hippolyte

photo © gezett.de

* 09.01.1952, St. Lucia, Saint Lucia
lives in: St. Lucia, Saint Lucia

Kendel Hippolyte (b. 1952 in Castries, the capital of St. Lucia) studied at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica. He worked as a teacher at St. Mary’s College in Vigie, Castries and at Sir Arthur Lewis College in Mourne. He is an active dramaturge and director with the Lighthouse Theatre Company, which he co-founded, and for which he has written eight plays. His best-known play, Drum Maker, uses idiomatic Caribbean language and explores the political context of the indigenous culture. In his poetry he works in traditional forms such as the sonnet or the villanelle as well as free verse and in forms influenced by rap and reggae.
He has published five volumes of verse and several collections marked by a free, modernist style.
His current focus is on using his skills as a writer and dramatist to raise public awareness and contribute to active solutions to critical social and political topics such as climate change.

photo © private

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