Happy Birthday, Kwame Dawes! | Poems Rethabile Likes
Happy Birthday, Kwame Dawes! | Poems Rethabile Likes 🎂 Happy Birthday, Kwame Dawes! Poet • Novelist • Critic • born 28 July 1962 Today we celebrate the birthday of Kwame Dawes — a Ghanaian-Jamaican poet, novelist, and critic. Here is his tender and devastating poem, "Cleaning," an act of love and dignity between a son and his father. Cleaning After a while, you don't bother with the brief and the pajamas; you leave him on the sheet, make him shit himself, then shift over to the other side until I can come, lift up the body, wipe his bottom with a soft cotton cloth, bundle up the sheet with two more in the corner, straighten out the plastic over the mattress— sometimes you have to wipe it, too, then put a towel under him until the other sheet dry, and all the time, you don't say...