Planet Dread

Dreadnought, I. Dread from the sea I was drawn, I

blue as dread, tender dread, taloned as our future dread.

Dread the constellation I was born under, dread I

slept under, dread the waves of history, blustering red.

Dread my mother’s calm. Dread the harpy’s song. Dread she

nursed me, dread she named me. Dread my girlhood

under sugar cane. Dread the hurricane. I was a child

of dread a psalm of dread, dread pressed into my palm

like the blessed herb. A divine dread, Rastaman said. Before I

could speak there was dread, before I could stumble.

Dread roamed the shore a ghostly spume, dreadless thread

of the woman I’m erasing, dread my one coastline crumbling

to sea rise, to abyss. Dread my dead tooth unmaking

the veil, dread the ointment I, dread the wound I, dread the wail I,

dread the johncrow’s eye, smoke of black clouds heralding

only dread. Skirmish of youth, my constant banner of dread.

Dread at home, dread to the bone, my father dangling his guillotine

of dread. Dread as daily bread. Nursed dark by decades of dread,

teachers recoiled at my knotted thorns of dread. How the white

girls blanched with dread. Scorned for the hair on my head.

Beware my Blackheart of dread, the reckless haunt of my dread,

girl born of nothing but salt-air and dread. Girl who bore nothing

but a vision of dread. Such a savage, dread. Thrum of the natty dread.

Congo Bongo dread. Martyred was the dread. Brother still the dread.

Blood of my dread. Babylon maiming families of dread, pastors railing

against our dread, dread the crown of heavens I wear upon this head. Dread

at the root, dread of the fruit. Sister of dread. Daughter of the dread.

First woman giving birth to her dread. A gorgon stoning every baldhead, dead.

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“In this poem, I ruminate on all the different ways the word ‘dread’ shapes my life. Dread defined much of my childhood and adolescence. I grew up in a strict Rastafari household in Jamaica, and, when I was a young girl with dreadlocks, my teachers looked at me with dread, my classmates treated me with dread. My sea village now exists in the direct path of climate dread. I wanted to trace all these different aural and etymological threads, including the root of the word ‘dreadlocks,’ which originated from the fear and disdain the majority of Jamaicans felt for the Rastafari and the way they wore their hair, resulting in Rastas being pushed to the fringes, outcast, tortured, and called ‘Blackheart Men’ in the early 1930s when the Rastafari movement began. Ultimately, Rastas reclaimed the word dread; to them dreadlocks are rooted in strength, a sacred marker of the Rastafari movement and a resolute rejection of British colonial rule. I wanted this poem to resemble an urgent chant, to be an incantatory accumulation of all that dread—national, historical, personal—gathered into a kind of linguistic current, harnessing the fire of the Rastafari vernacular, anticolonial fury, and Afrofuturist hope that made me; what I am calling ‘Rasta Poetics.’”
—Safiya Sinclair