The Bookshelf:

2026-03-29 - 00:35

Simone Leid is a Trinidadian poet and gender advocate whose writing reflects a deep engagement with gender and sustainable development work across the Caribbean. Her poems come from the women she meets and the conditions she encounters in her work. Leid founded the WomenSpeak Project, for which she received the BlogHer International Activist Scholarship in 2011 and was invited to speak in San Diego, bringing women together to write, perform, and articulate their experiences around gender-based violence, migrant rights, and the environment. She is a consultant in gender and development and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of the West Indies, St Augustine. Leid’s work clearly runs parallel to her writing: “Through a series of workshops in writing and other artistic disciplines, women come together to discuss issues such as gender-based violence, migrant rights and gender and the environment. They then use the skills of creative writing, spoken word and songwriting to create their own works that converse with these issues.” The manuscript Leid is currently querying, “Mother Tongue”, follows the emotional arc she describes in her craft. It begins with an attempt to reconstruct the migration of her grandmother, Vita Pollard, from St Vincent to Trinidad in the early 1940s, and widens into an account of how “colonisation, racism, extraction and abandonment have impacted the lives of working-class women.” Her poems move across time without separating past from present, from “the earliest days of genocide and enslavement” to “present day environmental degradation and capitalism in the Caribbean.” The poems also show how “even while the women in these poems navigate these hardships, they are also celebrated for their resilience, political acuity and leadership.” Leid describes writing, like many poets, as a way to find herself. “Any creative practice, first and foremost, is for the self. The idea of making something with your own hands is intrinsically satisfying... For poets, we use words as our material, and the tools of our practice (image, metaphor, detail and structure), to bring our creations to life.” But the process does not remain contained. Writing “helps reveal the self.” It becomes “a kind of alchemy, a summoning that calls up voices and feelings that opens the writer to new ways of seeing.” Writing is not fixed. “Writing is a discovery, even for the writer. You may set out to write about one thing and then find the poem takes you to a place you had not foreseen.” The result, Leid explains, has helped her to “interrogate my beliefs and values,” forcing her “to examine things from different perspectives,” and “creating narratives that draw from the experiences of others, but observed through my own value-lens.” Leid has honed her craft in various Caribbean literary spaces, including the Cropper Foundation Residential Workshop, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the Moko Writers’ Workshop. In 2010, Leid was shortlisted for the Small Axe Prize in Poetry. The following is an excerpt of poems from a collection by Simone Leid Poems. Mother Earth Gets Shot on the Beetham For Ornella Greaves All we who live close to the decay— The rancid carcass and every bloated Excess of the white man; the black Burning that never go out—we know If we don’t make a lil’ ramajay Bun some tire and skin we gum Princess Margaret and Uncle Tom go just turn The page to the next story. They make spectacle of our suffering And call it riot. When we boy-children get shoot In the road like dog, no matter what bring them to it The mother in we does bawl out. I went to make sure I was witness I went to show them that a poor woman Like me, can stand eye to eye with those Who perpetrate to jam they boot in we neck But as I pull out the phone to record My natural eye weaken—it tap my Spirit And the bullet find me like a magnet But as I fall down, the child in my belly Make me to see. It was the police who shoot me. ... What Did She Do? A woman is dead. Still in her car head slumped to one side The car she bought after three years Of saving every dollar from her side job Braiding hair on the weekend. She started braiding hair after friends Commented how she always looks so good And how well her man must be doing To keep her in hair extensions and new nails And she laughed because that’s what women do When they feel uncomfortable or threatened; A skill learned from having been followed And taunted for not responding to a soot And on Saturdays, she made corn soup Just the way her grandmother likes it – with plenty dumplings Cause she didn’t always have time to cook during the week And felt guilty for having to fill her children’s bellies with KFC And she and her girlfriends planned To go Tobago over the Easter Holiday cause It’s Hot Girl Weekend and they are still young And want to take selfies on the beach to post to IG And all her posts on IG are of her posing Pouty lips and hand hearts and glittery Filters showing her baby girl playing in the front garden Next to the new electronic security gate The one she installed after the police told her there was nothing They could do unless she first filed a restraining order. And on her way home from work she stopped by Pennywise To pick up a few packs of hair for a client coming tomorrow And then she pulled up in front of her driveway. ... Mother on the Hill Miss Pearl, my husband horning me again. I say the prayers you give me I try not to fuss with him like you say but nothing working. Talk to him for me. He will listen to you. Miss Pearl, my mother lose her job and as the man of the house I have to try an hustle a lil money to help wid my brothers and sisters an ting. I ain’t doing nothing wrong Miss Pearl. I promise. I just doing a lil job for Jerry. Don’t worry. Miss Pearl, that lil mad girl run away from the Home you know. Yes, they don’t just let them out so. I hope them dutty men don’t take advantage of her. I know you have your grandchildren or you woulda take her in. Wha bout me? I have to pray on that one Miss Pearl. Miss Pearl, you ain’t see how they mashing up the community center? After you get the MP to put up basketball court and table and chairs for the homework center. Burgess ain’t no good manager. Is best they give you back to hold the keys. Miss Pearl, my daughter get all her subjects praise God. Cheryl, thank Miss Pearl for getting your schoolbooks donated. Yes, she looking for a little job now. She need two recommendation Cheryl, tell Miss Pearl sorry for riding the bike over her flower bed. These bad-ass children, eh. End of excerpt Leid’s poems have appeared in Callaloo and Sx Salon, and more recently in Writing for Our Lives: A Caribbean Climate Justice Anthology (Peekash Press, 2025). Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist, a Guardian columnist, and the winner of the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.