ON A TOUR OF THE BAHAMAS



She'd fled there in '33, I heard,
with the Doktor and their son --
years before the Duke and Duchess,
banished in posh disgrace --
and she's outlived them all.
Queen Conch, the locals call her:
she hides curled up, shrunk back
in that shell, that Schloss I saw,
as alien as a shellfish in a wheat field,
Mitteleuropa erupting in the Out Islands.
She never goes out,
has everything delivered,
attends all day, all night, to God
knows what -- the tap's
repetitive drip,
the spaces between the drips,
the tap not dripping,
the wind-waved palm fronds tapping
clearly on the salt-bleared panes.
She lives all alone
except for those crows, those grackles,
whatever they are,
perching on her spires.
They keep apart; it's thought
they make up their own species.
Sometimes, it's believed,
she raises the grimy windows
and feeds them face to face.







Bruce Tindall
Published in Poem