Those villages stricken with the melancholia of Sunday, <br />in all of whose ocher streets one dog is sleeping <br /> <br />those volcanoes like ashen roses, or the incurable sore <br />of poverty, around whose puckered mouth thin boys are <br />selling yellow sulphur stone <br /> <br />the burnt banana leaves that used to dance <br />the river whose bed is made of broken bottles <br />the cocoa grove where a bird whose cry sounds green and <br />yellow and in the lights under the leaves crested with <br />orange flame has forgotten its flute <br /> <br />gommiers peeling from sunburn still wrestling to escape the sea <br /> <br />the dead lizard turning blue as stone <br /> <br />those rivers, threads of spittle, that forgot the old music <br /> <br />that dry, brief esplanade under the drier sea almonds <br />where the dry old men sat <br /> <br />watching a white schooner stuck in the branches <br />and playing draughts with the moving frigate birds <br /> <br />those hillsides like broken pots <br /> <br />those ferns that stamped their skeletons on the skin <br /> <br />and those roads that begin reciting their names at vespers <br /> <br />mention them and they will stop <br />those crabs that were willing to let an epoch pass <br />those herons like spinsters that doubted their reflections <br />inquiring, inquiring <br /> <br />those nettles that waited <br />those Sundays, those Sundays <br /> <br />those Sundays when the lights at the road's end were an occasion <br /> <br />those Sundays when my mother lay on her back <br />those Sundays when the sisters gathered like white moths <br />round their street lantern <br /> <br />and cities passed us by on the horizon<br /><br />Derek Walcott<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sabbaths-w-i/
