Your voice returned, a palm
frond startling the wind, then carried
off to sea a night the trees went
walking, adrift with memory
and sargassum, enduring grace
of the palm, despite estates and inns,
fictions of voyagers, the palm weep
for you, lost plumes of their dreaming,
offspring of the cleaving wind.
Gone frond, you stray, a weeping
guitar on the entangled Atlantic,
until the winged fish find you,
swarming into script, thousands
flitting, foil-flash, sea to sky to sea,
switching time, to spawn in your fan
of feathers, rouse the altering smoke
of life force, insistent as the hum
of cicada and the earth. The fish
purl you gravid with gold,
a manger, abyssal city, Dwaraka,
something scribbled on each leaf
in Sanskrit, here in the sewn and sewing
sea, which deifies change, defies it,
my creed. Fugitive palm, to the common
tern the surface boils, busy with living,
a tree again, gold to silver, we await
the season sea-beneath, winter blooms.
Christian Campbell is a Trinidadian Bahamian poet, essayist and scholar. He is the author of the widely acclaimed poetry collection Running the Dusk (2010), which won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was a finalist for the Forward Prize for the Best First Collection and the Cave Canem Prize among other awards. Running the Dusk was translated into Spanish by Aida Bahr and published in Cuba as Correr el Crepúsculo (2015).