TB: NATURE'S SCRIPT::PHOTOGRAPHY

Treasure Beach Forum: TB Runnin's: TB: NATURE'S SCRIPT::PHOTOGRAPHY
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By ZED on Thursday, April 22, 2010 - 02:48 pm: Edit Post

PHOTO GALLERY OFFERING: "NATURE'S SCRIPT"•••Images To Honour the Artistic Aura of the "Calabash" that Colours, Shadows, and Seeps into Soft and Stoney Pores Along These Shores

View Them Here:
http://treasurebeach.net/guide/pg/gallery/default.cfm?D=762


CORAL

A yellow mote of sand dreams in the polyp's eye;
the coral needs this pain.
Look closely:
the pearl has limestone ridges, hills,
out of it grows the sun
and the fat valleys of Jamaica,
deep mourning waters under the mornes,

The coral killers crust my wall of bone
make feet for the footprints on this first beach;
cold sea of sound splinters the fishes' dawn;
it rings bells in the shingle
it curls messages into the shell
it cuts me coconut branches
it tugs, whorls, it pushes
me, it teaches me how to swim
at midday it sparkles with screams and the sprats' silver.

Even when I was a slave here
I could hear the polyp's thunder
crack of the brain's armour
the ducts and the factories sucking
the rivers out, engineering
their courses, as if the stone
were a secret leaf, or fist curled
in embryo slowly uncurling.

The land rises slowly
fed by the ringed sun and the distant Amazon:
leaves, seed, silt, feathers,
broken wings, hooks, clutching eyes,
bugs, green-backed bats, leeches;
mud is a milk of darkness that feeds
orchids, roots that scramble outward like spiders,
tendrils that spin, weeds that hoot in their harness.

Here now are canoes, huts, yellowing corn husks, cassava,
hard harpoon heads, broken pots on the headland;
broken by time, by neglect, the rough boots
of Columbus, of pirate, the red boots of flame;
cracked souls of Africa, broken by the whip,
bit of pain between the teeth; broken by the rain,
the new shoots of the green-dollar cane.

But the coral builds
quarries, explosions.
limestone walls,
bougainvillea, churches, plantation halls,

and the morning rides higher and higher;
chapel bells bringing freedom's
dark clash, bayonet's clangour of iron
on chain, Bogle's legs swinging steep from their steeple of pain,
dead clapper, dead leader, dead bell.
leaden tongue, the snapped neck
slacker and slacker,

the narrow dead of the islands
chalk chalk
bone burning to limestone.
hills, porous tears, showers;
rain unhooks flowers,
green stars
of the soil stare up from the stalks,
the sky glints in the wet mud
streaked with trees,
hedges, darker
ponds. I hear the boom
of the mango, bursting its sweetness, spectacular
cloud riders through the tall
pouis: walls of white,
walls of red, stations
of bloom, wells
of bottomless
gloom.

And slowly slowly
uncurling embryo
leaf's courses sucking grain's armour,
my yellow pain swims into the polyp's eye.


--Kamau Brathwaite