Poems Rethabile Likes

Thomas Thistlewood and Tom by Pamela Mordecai | Poems Rethabile Likes "Thomas Thistlewood and Tom" by Pamela Mordecai Poet Pamela Mordecai reads from "Thomas Thistlewood and Tom" — a searing excerpt from her collection Subversive Sonnets (Tsar Books, 2012). Find her books Mordecai's Subversive Sonnets confronts the history of slavery in Jamaica through the figure of Thomas Thistlewood — a real historical figure, an eighteenth-century plantation overseer whose diaries documented, in clinical detail, the systematic torture and rape of enslaved people. In this excerpt, the poet gives voice to Tom — both the enslaved man and the ghost of Thistlewood's own name. The lines are unbearable and necessary: "I tell myself: 'So many days I dig the soft gr...