Sabbaths, W.I.

The poem

Those villages stricken with the melancholia of Sunday, in all of whose ocher streets one dog is sleeping

those volcanoes like ashen roses, or the incurable sore of poverty, around whose puckered mouth thin boys are selling yellow sulphur stone

the burnt banana leaves that used to dance the river whose bed is made of broken bottles the cocoa grove where a bird whose cry sounds green and yellow and in the lights under the leaves crested with orange flame has forgotten its flute

gommiers peeling from sunburn still wrestling to escape the sea

the dead lizard turning blue as stone

those rivers, threads of spittle, that forgot the old music

that dry, brief esplanade under the drier sea almonds where the dry old men sat

watching a white schooner stuck in the branches and playing draughts with the moving frigate birds

those hillsides like broken pots

those ferns that stamped their skeletons on the skin

and those roads that begin reciting their names at vespers

mention them and they will stop those crabs that were willing to let an epoch pass those herons like spinsters that doubted their reflections inquiring, inquiring

those nettles that waited those Sundays, those Sundays

those Sundays when the lights at the road's end were an occasion

those Sundays when my mother lay on her back those Sundays when the sisters gathered like white moths round their street lantern

and cities passed us by on the horizon