A 5.14 magnitude earthquake hit the BVI last week, so I revised this poem which was once about San Francisco, into an island poem. It was originally inspired by Venice in Jeanette Winterson's novel The Passion.
Volcanic Island
This island’s peaks and valleys often switch,
depending how the plates beneath us drift.
I’ll park uphill when I get home and find
my car downhill at six a.m. Some nights,
a sunset fills the window in our room.
On other days, a boulder is the view.
Kaleidoscopic turns change right to left.
Roads start, hairpin, dead end, then start again.
No moss can grow: shade’s never in the same
place long enough.
It’s our own fault, you say,
for if we left, then we’d be more mixed up
without the shift and slip. We’re better stuck
within the island rolling us around,
content until the day it moves us out.
