Derek Walcott - Midsummer lyrics

Certain things here are quietly American - that chain-link fence dividing the absent roars of the beach from the empty ball park, its holes muttering the word umpire instead of empire; the gray, metal light where an early pelican coasts, with its engine off, over the pink fire of a sea whose surface is as cold as Maine's. The light warms up the sides of white, eager Cessnas parked at the airstrip under the freckling hills of St. Thomas. The sheds, the brown, functional hangar, are like those of the Occupation in the last war. The night left a rank smell under the casuarinas, the villas have fenced-off beaches where the natives walk, illegal immigrants from unlucky islands who envy the smallest polyp its right to work. Here the wetback crab and the mollusc are citizens, and the leaves have green cards. Bulldozers jerk and gouge out a hill, but we all know that the dust is industrial and must be suffered. Soon - the sea's corrugations are sheets of zinc soldered by the sun's steady acetylene. This drizzle that falls now is American rain, stitching stars in the sand. My own corpuscles are changing as fast. I fear what the migrant envies: the starry pattern they make - the flag on the post office - the quality of the dirt, the fealty changing under my foot.