Sunday

Red Madonna, by Sir Dunstan St. Omer. Image courtesy of John Robert Lee

Sunday morning, quiet as pastures,
peaceful as cows standing so still
they look like boulders in the distance.
There’ve always been Sunday mornings like this,
when God became young again
and looking back you see
that childhood was a Sunday morning.
Now you see it, only now,
in the Thursday of your life,
pondering the week’s end.

Next door, some last night’s fool,
twitchy from the spasmic choreomania
that jumped up votaries of Saturn’s Club get up to,
turns up his set half-drunk full-blast,
scattering the blackbirds that were pecking nearer,
hanging over on my Sunday.
His is forever gone; he lives only
for the danse macabre at Saturn, the spent weak end.

As for me, sometimes a poem, brighter-feathered,
will alight, tip-tap closer for a while, then fly
to someone waving far across a quiet pasture.
And I walk back across my field of days,
following as best I can below,
toward a Sunday and a child,
ever more familiar …

This Sunday, though, in ordinary time, is passing —
time to do some work.

~ Kendel Hippolyte

Poet, playwright, director and general cultural activist, Kendel Hippolyte has been an integral part of the St. Lucian arts and culture landscape for decades. His latest collection, ‘Fault Lines’ (Peepal Tree Press 2012) won the OCM BOCAS prize for poetry in 2013.