Swim the sea at night around Grenada;
to view the phosphorescence crystal bright,
dazzling your eyes through limpid water;
If you could swim off Grand Anse Beach tonight
you could gaze upwards at the starlit sky
through sparkling sea then, turning from that sight
And weaving, diving, twisting, questing, try
to keep company with a shimmering shoal
where breaking, phosphorescent surf runs high.
Lit by its luminescence, you patrol
in hunger without wonder through the dark,
fixated, sated appetite your goal;
You have no choice, must kill to survive, sleepless shark.
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Author Notes
This is an example of the Terza Rima, a form that originated in Italy. It consists of an indeterminate number of tercets, rhyming aba, where the b line of any verse sets the rhyme for the first and last lines of the next tercet. The form may end with a couplet or, more usually as here, with a single line. This line or couplet must rhyme with the preceeding tercet's second line.
The poem takes an idyllic scene and turns it into a horror story in the final line.
Back in 1960 when I visited Grenada, courtesy of the Royal Navy Grand Anse Beach consisted of a mile of silver sand that swept round a bay in a gentle curve, bordered on one side by the clearest sea you ever saw and shoreside, by a dense growth of coconut palms. There was a rickety, wooden pier at the end of which perched a corrugated-iron-roofed shack that served as the only bar on the beach. I don't want to go back. I want to remember it as it was before it became lined, wall to wall, with four and five star hotels!
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