Immense and Clumsy
Elephant-like, steel grey body,
immense and clumsy on
our driveway, the Waterworks
truck ambles up, brings water
through a hose like a rubbery trunk,
to thwart the threat of extinction.
Greystones’ whitewashed roof
like snow melting provides daily
needs from caught tropical rain.
A silver-bullet tank shoots down
Lover’s Lane, the perfect weapon
for a season of drought when
a wild herd of cumulous elude,
roam, until lightning whips them
back into the island’s bone-thin hand.
Long Tale
The kiskadee, with a yellow
waistcoat, is full of himself.
White streaks on his face
the stuff of action heroes.
The bolts of electricity
as if heat shocked from
flying too close to the sun.
The robins in their burlap
rags, hop, hop to the day’s
crumbs, like I did in sack
races at BHS. I mimic
the longtail, burrow myself
in a room on cliffs above
the greeting sea, in the long
tale of my returning, leaving
each year at summer’s end.
Nancy Anne Miller is a Bermudian poet with eight published collections; Tide Tables (Kelsay, 2019) is her most recent. She is internationally published in the journals Edinburgh Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Agenda, Magma, the Fiddlehead, Interviewing the Caribbean, PREE, and the Caribbean Writer, and she is a MacDowell Fellow and Bermuda Arts Council Grant recipient.