Geoffrey Philp Miami (Holly Iglesias)
Archipelagos After Derek Walcott At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean, like when Hurricane Maria whipped the Atlantic into a ring of thunderstorms that advanced the way Auerbach described her vision of terror, “wooden huts torn away from their foundations were carried away, women and children were tied to the ceiling beams, but no one could see a tangle of arms waving from the roof, like branches blowing in the wind, waving desperately toward heaven toward the river banks for help.” And a man, chest-deep in the surge that snatched his family from his arms in waves, swelling before him, like how Columbus and his crew imagined Leviathan, “whose mere sight is overpowering,” and “looked down on all that is haughty.” But wasn’t it pride, greed, those sins we’ve forgotten, for they remind us of what we could have become instead of what we’ve settled for and extended our reach, like the virus with its crown of spikes, around the waist of the world to the polar ice caps, melting into the ocean that’s rising one inch every three years in Miami where leatherbacks lumber out of the water to lay their eggs, as carefully as I swaddle my grandniece in a blanket, which my daughter remembers in the same breath with the bumper sticker on the first car I owned, “Save the Whales,” the protests where we marched before she could walk, the war she inherited along with my grandmother’s hair—that simple country girl from St. James, home to Sam Sharpe and the Maroons who fought redcoats, their bayonets stained with the blood of Africans, kidnapped from huts under the growl of the harmattan’s sweep over the Sahara to the rim of the Cape Verde Islands, garlanded by trade winds that complete the circle and begin a new alphabet of catastrophe: hurricanes that stagger like a betrayed lover barreling through the islands until its rage is spent on the sands of our beaches littered with masks and plastic bottles. Originally published in Archipelagos published by Peepal Tree Press (2023). |
SoFloPoJo