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).