i feel like i have lived a thousand years,
i said to moon when she was fat and full,
when she grew dark i knelt and bled my tears
from wounds called eyes into a silver bowl.
i poured them down upon the plum tree root
as she went waxing through the midnight sky,
and though i never heard the drum and flute
young again i was, with wings to fly.
i saw her hanging with the noon’s sun king,
she never tried to make me understand,
nor did she ask for faith or blind believing
when eclipsed i couldn’t see her reaching hand.
o moon, i’m gone, i cried, and fell upon the earth,
yes, she said, but death is mother of rebirth.
•••
Lynn Sweeting is a prizewinning Bahamian journalist whose poems have appeared in The Caribbean Writer, Tongues of the Ocean, Poui, Yinna, and the Carifesta Anthology 2008. Her poems were included in Sisters of Caliban, a multilingual anthology of contemporary women poets of the Caribbean, edited by MJ Fenwick, (Azul Editions, 1997) and also in the Caribbean Writer’s Anthology of Writing from The Bahamas, 1997, which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She was awarded the 1998 Charlotte and Isador Paeiwonsky Poetry Prize from The Caribbean Writer and short-listed for the 2010 Small Axe Literary Prize. She is founding editor of WomanSpeak, A Journal of Writing and Art by Caribbean Women, writes regularly about women’s issues at her blog, Womanish Words, and is working on a poetry collection titled The Impossible Garden.
tongues of the ocean 