Microcosm

 

On a wooded hill yet green with summer light

 

 

under ten fingers springs the anonymity of grass.

 

 

A man may pause here, in a small hollow sheltered,

 

 

in some plain cleft of earth harboured; it is needed,

 

 

a place to lie, impersonal, unknown and separate.

 

 

The valley is asleep in a slow, broad sprawl.

 

 

This thin and oval stone, cold upon the brown earth,

 

 

is not dumb, nor is the grass, nor the curved stick

 

 

lying smooth by the brook's edge; you may listen

 

 

and through the unapparent sense learn from them

 

 

a new music, secret, and played on no instrument.

 

 

 

Flowing water floods the near meadow, furrows

 

 

an unresisting loam to fit its determined shape,

 

 

models a smooth channel to take its clear passage.

 

 

Across the late summer sky, swift, sun-flashed birds

 

 

plunge from flight to flight, shining like knives

 

 

arched by a juggler through the pale, blue air.

 

 

                          

 

 

                           I have known

 

 

all this prone on a small hill in a minor island where

 

nightly after sundown you may view an endless deep of stars.

 

                        - A. L. Hendriks

 

p. 108 Volume II The Blue Horizons -- Carribean Voices selected by John Figueroa