Commissioned by the Arts Council as part of a series of 12 poems written in response to the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. Other poets commissioned included Hugo Williams, Fred D’Aguiar, Benardine Evaristo, Paul Farley, Benjamin Zephaniah, and Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze. Magnitude has also been critiqued by Elizabeth Rose Murray.

I

There are a million grains in a 20 kilogram sack of rice.
Give or take. It’s a hard enough number to imagine,

the kind that slips through the fingers, like digging
your hands in that same sack, trying to feel

for individuals; the kind of counting that’s
bigger than the mind’s computational eye,

like the full, unending girth of sky, like death,
the kind of threshold you concede

and take for granted. Imagine the sum
in eleven of those sacks, and I’m trying to find a way

to make that number real, like how many pots and how long
it might take to cook that much rice, and still retain the detail

of each swollen grain; a real, fleshy equation that might capture
the percentage of wastage, the amount that would fall

and be forgotten even while trying to keep count,
the appetite that might be necessary to take it all in.

II

In a lesson on trying to make the abstract more concrete,
one of my students, a Guyanese boy, late teens,

shares a draft in which he’s counting
the breaths of his sleeping girlfriend.

He’s met her father, shook his hand –
weeks later, the girl explains

that her Akan blood arrows back up to royalty,
that the boy is the son of a slave,

that there is no future for them, only a past.
I understand that the counting makes it easier,

lends a sense of a narrative, a march into the future
of something as simple as breath, in the face of something

so large it blots whatever light he’d been drawn by,
but it’s not working, and as much as I try,

I can’t suggest anything to make the poem any easier,
until he offers a resolution: a memory

of sitting on the sea wall in Georgetown, facing the Atlantic,
following the darts of sunlight riding the backs of waves,

wondering where each began, how each follows
the heels of another as they furl

towards wall or shore, how he can only understand
as much of it as his eye can drink in,

how the rest, for him, is a mystery.