Once

Once, 

I heard a country music

in the showers of yesterday

where the smell of coconut trees
weaved with the white of clouds.

This country where I had lived,
this country
of wet muds, of rivers and riverines,
whose boats are long dead floras and who must
forget what it owes, to this land and to the
sea, to rivers that flow to thee.

The rains had wet me, when I was young
and I had buried a coin beneath that mud-
when the floods came another year
it took my mud home with a sear, but if


I am not mistaken today,
you can still find the bushes of yesterday,
the coconut trees
still stand right there,
like human beings
that grow in fear.