On Sundays, Granny wakes beneath a cerulean sky
Weighing the hours before Mass
Stirring heart and soul into a cauldron of swine's blood
Ruddy as Christmas sorrel
Meting its fury with black pepper
Garden herbs
And cooked rice
Granny pipes the black pudding into casings of flesh
Moulding it into sustenance
To tame our wild appetites
Dipping the numbles into a cocotte
The size of a plenilune
Until the broth curds
And the smell of the thing howls at us
Like the tradewinds of our history –
Full bodied
Savory
Making the best of the sordid remnants of beasts
Boudin is the colour of the currency that brought us to unspoilt isles – our skin
It is the link that binds generations of West Indians to their ancestors – our blood
It is the repartee that cradles our stories – our tongue
Boudin wraps itself in a soft shell of rebellion
Licks its lips
And belches irreverently
To let hunger know
That death will have to come back another day
Hailing from the Commonwealth of Dominica, the Nature Island of the Caribbean, Yakima Cuffy is an
award-winning writer, poet and playwright. A lawyer by profession, the prominent themes in her
writing are patriotism, West Indian identity, migration, faith and sensuality. Ms. Cuffy's work has been
published in adda – the Commonwealth Writers literary magazine, The Caribbean Writer Volume 35,
Midnight and Indigo Online Magazine, and the Waitukubuli Writers Anthology of New Dominican
Writing. She has won Dominica’s National Independence Literary Competition on numerous occasions. Ms. Cuffy has also been longlisted for the BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Award for Writers in the Caribbean three times, emerging as a finalist in 2020 and 2024. She also performs Spoken Word poetry at various events, including Bocas Literary Festival’s Stand and Deliver segments. Yakima is a graduate of the University of the West Indies, Cavehill Campus and an alumni of the Create Caribbean Crafting Short Fiction Writing Workshop.