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MANNA
by LEONARD DILBERT

It's all about
how yesterday falls to earth
how it enters the soil where we are attempting to live;
these coral-boned fragments of ground
where we Caymanians prune memory
to fruit what we want to parade:

not that long-time story
about masters with slaves
not here
not in iron manacles
not us
fingers blistered
and bone shattered within trying to conjure
the iron shape of things in time to come.

No, we've simply gathered up in fevered fists
a serenity we never sowed
from 'hard tarrace' to ironshore
as though we believed it just drizzled down, like manna

and we hover unamazed as arrant butterflies
at the way grace feeds even the faithless, ravening
in their imagined wildernesses.

Daily, we put our hands out
lax bodies bathe in a luxury like soft rain -
in a kind of rest, a sort of sleep,
in a sleight form of forgetting.