Trades

This year of even numbers says all will be reconciled

Yet today there is a north-easterly wind;

the trades blow south

into palm trees and rum and blinding sun.

 

Years ago pirates moved for good,

they forgot the cold cities and chose

hot flesh and madness and disappeared but

there in the islands

you’ll find someone, brown skin and eyes

like oceans and you’ll see

how like the wind we are.

(no subject)

There was one big thing that happened to our island in the old days before cell phones and cable TV, before the recession, before the Third War. We had a coup d’état, I use the French to sound savvy but really what it was was a Muslim sect called Muslimeen, run by a shrewd man called Mohammed, who used his name to sound more powerful than he really was. The Muslimeen attacked our Parliament and our only television station and we all hid in our homes until the Americans came and freed us. I remember watching the movie The Little Mermaid over and over, intermittently interrupted by this man in a skull cap who talked about things like freedom and rights. I’d enjoyed the movie but wondered what it was about. My parents talked about queuing outside Santa Anna’s grocery store in Woodbrook and having to lie flat on the pavement after hearing gunshots but they sounded excited and only a little scared. Anyway Mohammed was caught but pardoned because he’d allowed Members of Parliament to escape unharmed. His sect still lives now in some reconstructed marshlands just outside the city.