Poem – ‘Homage’

Homage

Words that rang in me

Rhyme that sprang from me

And warmed the night

And what was right

Became me…

Neil Diamond

“Verandahs, where the pages of sea…”,

and almost everything exfoliates

suddenly, exploding softly, as simply as

the night dissolves to dawn,

like this life dilating to another light

as easily as any heart ever opens

to its first true love

of poetry

In the middle of some arctic night

of my heart, I found another

life and named part its tale my own,

staked a claim for my life’s metaphor

on the illumination of a simple flame

So that, across this half-century,

Anna reincarnated becomes my own

Ilona; and on this different shore,

the Vigie hospital is the AISM

at Ocean View International Hotel

where, ambitious with the age, the

novice nurse in another life,

haunted by some dead cousin’s ghost,

aspires to neurosurgery

Fifty-three years later, on this cleft

island of coast, GT, seen

through the charred skeleton

of Kissoon’s Furniture City

or any of its boast of ruins on

Regent Street, became another Castries

Your words were a sun awakening

in the centre of an arctic night;

a light, spreading light, like

the morn, melting shadow, dispersing

pain, till my own life shone anew,

reborn, my heart seemed almost whole again

Poetry redeems,

but only so much;

were some shadow-stricken places no

word of light or love could reclaim;

some smoldering things that lay, like

ashes, feigning coolness, till touched,

then they flare to a pain searing

past all metaphor, to this scorched numbness…

And from the mind’s ash-coolness, one whisp-

er of a question wafts. Why, till now,

should anything burn so? O, the insane

resonant fires that scorch this coast,

this haunted heart with its ghost of flame.