Sabbaths, W.I.

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