28 DECEMBER 1962, Page 21

Nights in the Gardens of Port of Spain

Night, a black summer, simplifies her smells, makes her a village; she assumes the impenetrable mask of the negro, grows secret as sweat, her alleys odorous with shucked oyster shells, coals of gold oranges, braziers of melon; commerce and tambourines increase her heat.

Hellfire or the whorehouse: crossing Park Street a surge of sailors' faces crests, is gone

like the wave's phosphorescence, the boites-de- nuit

jingle like fireflies in her kinky hair.

Blinded by headlamps, deaf from hi-fl klaxons, she lifts her face from the cheap, pitch-oil flare towards hard, starry cities flashing neon, impatient for the bitch she must become.

As daylight breaks the Indian turns his tumbril of hacked, beheaded coconuts towards home.

DEREK NA AI COTT