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).
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).