London
The body of a queen
is carried through Westminster Abbey.
Below the floor lie tombs
of Newton, Darwin, and Hawking.
One can still sense Churchill
and the bombings
as a waitress from Ukraine
serves sushi in the evening.
Milliners of Sierra Leone sell stacks
of fedoras, pork pie, and driving caps.
World commerce conducts its business
from 17th-century wooden edifices
behind high rise, modern glass buildings
while an enormous ferris wheel
called the London Eye spins above
the river Thames.
History shifts in its waters. Sonnets
of Shakespeare repeat in theaters.
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Full Moon Over Beirut
A man reads a newspaper on the sixth floor.
He looks up and out at the open-air —
once a wall, now an overhang, cliff of brick
bombed last month. He has become
accustomed to this. The man sips
a glass of tea, warm and fragrant
with mint inside the tall building, exposed.
He has always been exposed. His people,
the story, ancient. Beyond the dead.
One must believe in wind if not in dirt.
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The West Indies
A spider monkey screeches at dawn.
Palm trees tremble in tropics
above the sea.
We are rocked in waters
off Santa Lucia, an island
Derek Walcott wrote of, inside
one of the brightly painted houses on a hill.
Aqua yellow rose.
Poems scribed on barbaric history
of slave trading, plagued throughout
the Caribbean. Giving form
and order to cruelty.
Penned. Documented. Bleeding
poetry. Further up the beach —
an enormous skeleton of a whale —
its architecture resembling
magnificent arches inside a cathedral
where one could enter, be at peace.
The whale’s organs and blood long gone
but the carcass, that construct — eternal
reminder of permanence. Walcott’s
poems resonating timelessness.
Lava flowing from Volcano
Soufrière fuming in the distance.