Wet Season Memories

The years have burst their drying pods,

cringing and flying like cotton before wind

and I forget about poui season in the hills.

I forget it is wet season in Trinidad

when rain in the morning sounds like so many tongues

prophesying the excitement of afternoon floods,

as branches palm greenly against galvanized roofs.

I forget the lighting-damp silences of nights,

the electric fan blowing away the mosquito room,

leaving only mango-filled windows, the moon

like a sky-jumbie bathing in the glass.

It has been ages since those drizzling Sundays

when we swam, together, through Tunapuna market,

hearing in the underwater a boy plugging poinsettias,

seeing thyme illuminated on chicken feed bags.

There must be life in these dried up memories,

some arable place left over from all those years

where I can plunge these withered dreams deep in water,

watch them bleed to life again.

The poem above originally appeared in Bim: Arts for the 21st Century, volume 3, number 2, published in 2010 by the Errol Barrow Centre for Creative Imagination at the University of the West Indies Cave Hill Campus, and edited by Barbadian author and educator Esther Phillips. This work is the intellectual property of the author. All rights reserved.