At Grande Rivière / danielle boodoo-fortuné

Posted on 3 Comments on At Grande Rivière / danielle boodoo-fortuné

It’s been said
the world rests
on a turtle’s back.

At Grande Rivière,
sea opens under stillborn moon,
the burden of creation shifts
inside scarred casing.

Dark eyes leak nebulae
breath rasps with the turning
of tides half world away.

World turtle,
you must be weary of salt now.
The sea is heavy,
time is long.

I fear that you will turn again
from these loud voices and prying hands
and cast this land from your back,
set us adrift on a cosmic ocean
while you swim free at last
into the stars.

•••

Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné is a poet and artist from Trinidad. Her poetry has been featured in Bim: Arts for the 21st Century, The Caribbean Writer, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, tongues of the ocean, Canopic Jar, Small Axe Literary Salon and Poui: Cave Hill Journal of Creative Writing. In 2009 she was awarded the Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Poetry Prize from The Caribbean Writer. She was a participant in the 2010 Cropper Foundation Caribbean Writers’ Residential Workshop. She is currently the poetry editor at Anansesem: the Caribbean Children’s Literature Magazine.

3 comments

  1. I love the uniqueness of your poems. Turtles and tides are part and parcel of the breathing of our eco-system. You make us see this.

  2. I like this poem very much. I have long admired Danielle’s work, one of the fresh, new voices of Caribbean Literature. The last two stanzas lifts the poem for me from the particular locale to the bigger picture, indeed. Accessible language and images.

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