The text of the next stanza reads "nvr." The text is bolded.The text of the next stanza reads: "Yu will wear this ermine fita on yr wrist. and this white lèkè / round yr twisted waist- / line as if yuo was a womans".The text of the next stanza reads: ". I cannot be surVivor of yr poems .". The ‘v’ in ‘survivor’ is enlarged and bolded.” width=”1024″ height=”675″ /> 
Mistress of the Blue
Kamau Brathwaite
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“Mistress of the Blue” by Kamau Brathwaite from Equinox, copyright © 2026 by Beverley Brathwaite.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1930–2020) was a Caribbean writer and critic who wrote on the experience of black cultural life throughout the worldwide African diaspora. Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, Brathwaite was educated in Barbados and England and received numerous awards for his poetry and cultural studies, including both Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. He was a professor of Comparative Literature at New York University starting in 1992 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Sussex in 2002.
Equinox is an unforgettable and never-before-published masterwork completed by Kamau Brathwaite before his death in 2020. Written in his unique Sycorax typeface and replete with compelling images and photographs, Equinox contains poems written in Brathwaite’s singular Barbadian vernacular and visionary style—poems about the Middle Passage, the natural world, Billie Holiday, Whitney Houston, the Kumina dance in Jamaica, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, and Breughel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” among many tidalectic topics. The lyrical poems in Equinox weave together history and culture with the imagery of Brathwaite’s native Barbados, weaving a lush tapestry of injustice, redemption, and hope.
"Kamau Brathwaite is one of the most important poets in the Western Hemisphere. A musicianly sensibility of sharp political reference."
—Amiri Baraka
"To read Kamau Brathwaite is to enter into an entire world of human and natural histories, beautiful landscapes and their destruction, children’s street songs, high lyricism, court documents, personal letters, literary criticism, sacred rites, eroticism and violence, the dead and the undead, confession and reportage."
—2006 Griffin Poetry Prize Citation
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