assignment #5

Island Man (for a Caribbean island man in London who still wakes up to the sound of the sea)

by Grace Nichols

.

Morning

and island man wakes up

to the sound of blue surf

in his head

the steady breaking and wombing

wild seabirds

and fishermen pushing out to sea

the sun surfacing defiantly

from the east

of his small emerald island

.

He always comes back

groggily groggily

comes back to sands

of a grey metallic soar

to a surge of wheels

to dull North Circular roar

muffling muffling

his crumpled pillow waves

island man heaves himself

another London day

I think that I would like to wake up on a beach in Hawaii, because when I was growing up, my parents always told me about how they lived on an island and them and their brothers and sisters used to camp out on the beach. They said it was kind of scary in the silence of the night, with the loud crashes of a wave on the beach and I thought that would be so cool after a scary movie to go sleep out there, but they said that it was so nice to watch the sunrise with the beach slowly coming to life.