Written piece
Soufrière Isle (Alliouagana! Montserrat)
Brenda McCartney
Montserrat
About this piece
A stitch poem of my Montserrat's memory, of culture and natural abundance. It shows how we endure through displacement, how we celebrate our Island stories with fierce pride. Through transformation and the ache and gift of returning home, we, our people, endure, and we rise.
I was born where key limes flash like small suns.
Where time is measured by the ripening of hairy mangoes,
guinep, sea grapes, plum rose, a hand of bananas.
Plums hang like tiny orbs of sunset,
sugar apples fleshy, succulent with stories of summers past.
I swim in streams, I walk the ghauts,
slip from mossy stones.
My skin holds the taste of sea;
I scoop spring water, fill my thirst.
Memories cling, thicker than sap;
fire folds me yet, I hold my shape.
I catch the rain - the flow splits at stone sill.
What was buried stirs…
I hold; I never tire.
I watch Erin climb Chances Peak
to play the golden harp,
weep with mermaid over Plymouth,
see ash reign, see land form.
I have seen shifts: population, geography, topography,
ideologies, nationalities.
Wave goodbye, welcome them back;
embrace them in the earth.
My soil travels through continents,
drifts beneath waves,
flies in the sky to distant lands,
still the tide brings me back.
Ancient Galway still breathes in me,
bringing new life.
Golden strings, undone by volcanic breath,
restrung as brass.
Drop the rum punch in the corner for our ancestors’ feast;
crack the whip, ward off spirits in shifting frames
Masquerade’s music fades; soca surges,
Whine and sing, ride the riddim.
“Feeling Hot Hot Hot” blasts the air, moves
where soles sear on black-silver sand.
Sunbathe in sea island cotton, a second skin,
as sun shifts from blinding white to chill.
A rebuilt world, our people shoulder to shoulder.
Soufriere’s spark stays.
Water wells in the corner of my eye,
pricking like cusha-acacia – that piercing spike.
In that surge of fire, sea and sentiment.
Alliouagana! Montserrat,
we rise,
bringing light to land and name.