Writer’s Note:
I first thought of this poem while floating aboard a rickety fishing boat several miles off the coast of Tobago. Craning my neck to look towards the island, I caught sight of its lush palm trees and rolling hills, all surrounded by a gleaming turquoise sea. For a second, I forgot all my classmates’ chatter. I imagined myself as a pale-skinned colonial Englishwoman, sailing across this same harbor towards unfamiliar shores. I thought of how foreign, how bright and bizarre the wide blue sky and chattering parrots must have seemed to these women. They must have been so homesick for the grey skies of London, so lonely for loved ones’ voices as they overheard guttural Creole conversations in the street. Perhaps the wives’ most difficult task was clinging to “civilized” British customs while simultaneously resisting the charms of a beautiful island. The only thing more difficult for the wives than preserving their European heritage had to be when the gleaming, exotic island eventually became their home, only for feuding colonial powers to snatch it away in a decisive naval battle.
Thoughts of these women re-entered my mind when I was on the island of St. Lucia. St. Lucia was fought over by French and British naval fleets for over 150 years. Its strategic location in the Caribbean Sea caused colonial powers to ravage the island with fourteen bloody wars. However, after spending a week in St. Lucia I couldn’t believe that such passionate battles had been fought entirely for an island’s location. If I had fallenin love with St. Lucia after a mere week, how strongly the French and British must have felt towards the foreign island – a place which would eventually become both parties’ homes. Wars fought for 150 years are not fought for logistical reasons. Rather, in my opinion, they are fought to reclaim a beloved home – a place the French and British never dreamed that the exotic, far-flung colonial outpost of St. Lucia would become.
This work chronicles the Battle of the Saints, fought at famed St. Lucian landmark Pigeon Point. It took place during the American Revolutionary War, and ended with the victory of Admiral Sir George Rodney of the British navy over the French fleet of Comte de Grasse. I have written from the perspective of the British generals’ wives, who in my imagination understand better than their husbands the real reason why the battle is fought.
The format of my poem is based off Derek Walcott’s St. Lucian epic poem Omeros. Walcott wrote his Novel Prize-winning book in terzarima, which consists of three-line stanzas interlinked by a regular rhyme scheme, with the second line of each stanza rhyming with the first and third of the next. Each stanza is approximately 10-12 syllables. I did not incorporate any rhyme scheme into my poem, but in honor of Walcott I wrote my poem in three-line stanzas, each consisting of 10-12 syllables.
To the British Women of St. Lucia
The wives’ stays were laced tight as they left London town,
handkerchiefs waving on board in the breeze the way
palm trees shuddered when their ship’s bow hit bleached coral
shores. Sick from their cramped cabin’s stale sea biscuit smell,
they gulped salty air like porpoises, shining pale
in the sun. Ribcages strained against whalebone, and all
the wives wanted was to dive, like whales, into the tide.
But they refrained. Curled stiff upper lips around
a tea cup’s china rim, brew sweetened with cane
razed from the fields like slaves from Africa’s coast.
Furnished sugary houses with molasses money.
Took evening walks. Sipped rum. Laced their stays tighter.
Watched from wide ribbon-sash porches the way flowers
trembled insolently from tree branches, longed
to bury English rose faces into jacaranda
blossoms. But they inhaled smelling salts instead,
fearing that falling white blossoms would baptize
Christian souls with the spirit of the soukayant
they had learned of from the cinnamon tree’s nighttime
whispers. Stays were re-boned, re-laced, tightened, to keep
skin from sliding off into a ball of fire.
But the sun’s fire was what caused the wives’ stays to burst.
Not spontaneous combustion, but gradual,
the way dawn’s light steals across a cold parquet floor.
A cocoa smile from a serving girl, cocoa
beans on their tongues. Sticky flypaper evenings where
the wives fluttered around candles like fragile moths.
Wicker picnic baskets and hills that undulated
like hips, swaying unconsciously to drum beats
drifting from the workers’ barracks across the fields.
Note: According to Caribbean legend, a soukayant is a female witch who sheds her skin and transforms into a flying ball of fire, intent on possessing another’s body.
Bonnets were left hanging in closets, and faces
turned to teak, like the French ships sailing into
harbor one morning as the wives netted purses, made
lace. Read measured poetry that no longer
fit free verse lives, pages filled with cool images
of nightingales and rain, scorched by smoke drifting from
Pigeon Point. Chivalrous knights transformed into dead
husbands, bloodied bodies stiff like rusted cannons.
Except that day the cannons were black like pitch swamp,
and breaking ships creaked like rocking chairs as the women
waited at home for the battle to end.
Pigeon Point exploded as mourning doves cooed on
windowsills and knitting needles clicked repetitive
Hail Marys in the countryside. And the Union Jack
flew, but the Saints were the wives, fighting with steel
musket eyes and cutlass fists all the way from their
front stoops for an island which had slowly, creepingly,
hesitantly, irrevocably become theirs.