SABBATH (FEATURED POST)

        

Those villages stricken with the melancholia of Sunday

 In all of whose ochre 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 

Written/Composed by: Sabbaths, W.I. by Derek Walcott