Coral

Lyrics

Brathwaite's reading of this poem can be heard on SoundCloud, or by opening this annotation CoralA 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 Haiti, deep mourning waters under the mornes. The coral killers crust my wall of bone make feet for 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 mе coconut branches it tugs, whorls, it pushes me, it tеaches 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 factories sucking the rivers out, engineering their courses, as if the stone were a secret leaf, or a 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 tough boots of Columbus, of pirate, the red boots of flame; cracked soles of Africa, broken by whip, bit of pain between teeth; broken by 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.