The Sunday Poem: Caura by Anthony Joseph

Heading every east along

the coast on a road we were on.

We had just left the thrift shop,

sheer drop/scorched rim of the world.

Streets where vendors sold khaki masks

and magnets. The cool leaves

of morning warmed through the hours.

And the poet and I go walking

along the river, black river bottom,

burnt mother roux and rice in the water

Our mother who art among the bamboo,

washing an iron pot in brackish water.

The burnt smell of an image which

in relinquishing the gulf between language

and what it describes is forever fading

into the cool dark, where the water is deepest.

Anthony Joseph is a British-Trinidadian poet, novelist and musician. His books include the TS Eliot prize-winning Sonnets for Albert, and his latest collection, Haunting the Black Air, will be published by Bloomsbury Poetry on 2 July

Illustration by Chris Riddell