Gros-ilet.

• Author: Walcott, Derek
• Position: LATITUDES - Poem - Reprint

From this village, soaked like a grey rag in salt water, a language came, garnished with conch shells, with a suspicion of berries in its armpits and elbows like flexible oars. Every ceremony commenced in the troughs, in the middens, at the daybreak and at the daydark funerals attended by crabs. The odours were fortified by sea. The anchor of the islands went deep but was always clear in the sand. Many a shark, and often the ray, whose winds are as wide as sails, rose with insomniac stare from the wavering corals, and a fisherman held up a catfish like a trendrilled head. And the night with its certain, inextinguishable candies was like All Souls' Night upside down, the way a bat keeps its own view of the world. So their eyes looked down, amused, on us, and found we were walking strangely, and wondered about our sense of balance, how we slept as if we were dead, how we confused dreams with ordinary things like nails, or roses, how rocks aged quickly with moss, the sea made furrows that had nothing to do with time, and the sand started whirlwinds with nothing to do at...