Bright sunshine awakens the island
most mornings, resplendent, yet scorching;
at dusk, it crouches behind clouds and stoops under the benches of the hills and is gone
all night, like an absent landlord,
gone to some faraway land, leaving the house
unguarded against the terrors that roam its aisles.
But on mornings like these it returns
like a resurgent sea, its waves
stifling the rocks of the shoreline and its sting
like a slavedriver's whip, falling like rain
on a day when the sun is pushed
to the edge of the world, and the land takes on
a dark persona,
the black scorch of a violent burn.
- Nicholas Alexander
Childhood
Then we were blithe, and sure as a goat
that did not know the end
of its quickening leaps, in buttery light:
the knife-hand, the red throat.
After May's grey-flecked mould, warm
life stirred in the grass.
The logwood blossoms' yellow swarm
hummed with the Sunday witnesses
murmuring prayers for the dead,
while over the tombs we children leapt
to touch home at a crypt-
the knife unseen, the goat's bleat unheard.
- Verna George
A Plain Love
I searched the corners of your space
for a hook where kindness might hang.
My wings grew weary; I collapsed
at your carved, brass gate.
A neighbour screams her valley's
wide pain, blaming anyone
at her crossing, while my suffering,
born of silence, envies her release.
When I was empty you scooped me in.
I wonder why you waited so long.
Inside, I reduced your love
from lofty rafters to grains
in the resin-filled floor; I searched your face,
but saw there only
icy reflections of my own fears.
Know, as I speak my escape:
a plain love would have sufficed.
- Sonja Harris