Even when the ground seems steady, there is always a farewell in movement
I know this because I know the landscape of my island
And I have never been its cedar forest
My rootedness tangles the soil here differently,
In a way that ties but does not lash me to my home
Because I am here, I know the shifts and changes
Familiar and comforting are the days when sky is milky like the sea
And a dark curtain of distant falling rain
Blankets, curtaining the west,
Carving this slender landscape into ever thinner strips
It is stunning to see horizon from this shore
I was here, for a time
And when first I said goodbye I could not imagine a return
The curve of Dockyard fixed in place
Like some strange event horizon
Holding me at bay, with all the fury of history
Beating at my back
Refusing to shift the soil that was choking out the root
The days I felt the sea raging in my blood
Showed me I was not to be a glassy pool
Softly reflecting blurry pastel cottages
The elements I could not help but evoke
Drawn dormant from the heart of this island
Whipped into memory
Our volcanic origins, all but forgotten,
Rising again resplendent from the sea
Yes, it is dazzling to see horizon
Especially during a storm
To fill a gateway with imaginings
To speak and dream and act from a place so fixed
That, in standing,
All that now remains
Is to step on through
•••
Kim Dismont Robinson is the Folklife Officer for the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs in Bermuda. Her writing has been published in The Caribbean Writer, Anthurium, Sargasso, The Journal of West Indian Literature, I Wish I Could Tell You: Bermuda Anthology of Children and Young Adult Fiction and Bermuda Anthology of Poetry Vols. I and II.
tongues of the ocean 
Nancy Anne Miller
K., “Our volcanic origins, all but forgotten” is such a powerful reminder of the island’s fiery origins. Thank you for retrieving the memory and memorializing it in a poem. N.