Of Things, Sketches and Reflections is one of the early publications by Trinidad-born, Dr. Harold Mahabir, who is an adjunct member of the College Prep Department. This poem was published in the Trinidad Express, one of the leading Caribbean newspapers, when his book was reviewed, "I like these poems which were featured by the Express, not only for there indigenous settings, but for the symbolic strength and endurance of woman."
She scurries in her pirogue across the sea
like through a roadway in an automobile,
rounds the corners of sharp coves and bays
rides the potholes and ruts of changing
troughed waves.She is open
to the tropic temperaments
to the sun's blister without a cloud
the rains that look like a wet-look cloth.
Each day she ferries her child to school
and returns, without need of fisherman parent
or spouse. She unmoors her boat
pulls on its power
directs it with stern grip on rudder
her keel aslant
high on a wave crest
squirting the frantic waters like squids' legs.
She had dipped her childhood years
into the sea, floated up and swam
like a foetus in amnion,
like a floating nereid
familiar with the wave foams
as the white divides on a pitch-road.
I stand like Darwin and watch
this creature of adaptation, this woman
who scales a rockface to her yard
where her fine trees bear
the floral centres of finer threads;
who jumps from sea to land
like an amphibian
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