virtual open microphone...

[Winston Kinch]

OK, OK, going for raw beauty and power eh? And of course Joelle, those
first two lines you picked arguably, just by themselves, the most powerful
love poem ever writtten...
Here is a favourite of mine which I can never complete reading aloud
before I blub. I was born and raised in Barbados in the West Indies
and this is by a well known Barbadian man of letters. I wager anyone who
has spent a significant amount of time on a tropical island will be moved
by it...

HYMN TO THE SEA

Like all who live on small islands
I must always be remembering the sea,
Being always cognizant of her presence; viewing
Her through apertures in the foliage; hearing,
When the wind is from the south, her music, and
The warm rankness of her; tasting
And feeling her kisses on bright sunbathed days:
I must always be remembering the sea.

Always, always the encircling sea,
Eternal: lazylapping, crisscrossed with stillness,
Or windruffed, aglitter with gold; and the surf
Waist-high for children, or horses for titans;
Her lullaby, her singing, her moaning; on sand,
On shingle, on breakwater, and on rock;
By sunlight, starlight, moonlight, darkness:
I must always be remembering the sea.

Go down to the sea upon this random day
By metalled road, by sandway, by rockpath,
And come to her.  Upon the polished jetsam,
Shell and stone and weed and saltfruit
Torn from the underwater continents, cast
Your garments and despondencies, re-enter
Her embracing womb: a return, a completion.
I must always be remembering the sea.

Life came from the sea, and once a goddess arose
Fullgrown from the saltdeep, love
Flows from the sea, a flood; and the food
Of islanders is reaped from the sea's harvest.

And not only life and sustenance; visions, too,
Are born of the sea: the patterning of her rhythm
Finds echoes within the musing mind.
I must always be remembering the sea.

Symbol of fruitfulness, symbol of barrenness,
Mother and destroyer, the calm and the storm!
Life and desire and dreams and death
Are born of the sea; this swarming land
Her creation, her signature set upon the salt ooze
To blossom into life; and the red hibiscus
And the red roofs burn more brightly against her.
I must always be remembering the sea.

Frank Collymore

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