With Cancer and With Child by Dr. Harold Mahabir

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."

Her time skated on the hazards

of a roller, on the tumorous ball

tossed to jerk and rhythm

of her lung. And each blood-bit coughed up

was a little life-spill.

Wells for eyes,their ink

wrote the lustres of her life

marked hope with her hand

on the limbs moving in her womb.

There lay the continuity

amid nature's felling nonchalance.

her hair flared down her shoulder

like a prayer-shawl,plaited into thickness

like a rope moored to the gates

of a Seventh Heaven, to the mat folded

after her noon-tide zorah.

She prayed on the count of her beads

a hundred times around.Acceptance

fulfilled her extended hands, peace

numbed her to the probe in her spine.

And her strength became memorial.