The Island's area is 111,111 square kilometers (according to the Army)
or 120,500 square kilometers (by the Bureau of Census figures).
Its principal product is sugar cane.
Its most valuable metal, nickel.
It now has a population, comprised of a mixture of virtually every race, of some 9,000,000 people.
It is long and narrow, its shape most often compared to the outline of a cayman or of its own peculiarly fashioned plowshare.
Its climate is torrid and bullying.
Its basic tradition: superficiality, inconstancy, and slothfulness.
111,111 square kilometers
(according to the Army)
of mind-numbing tedium.
120,500 square kilometers
(according to the Census Bureau)
given over in perpetuity to erosion and putrefaction, to corruption and pollution.
120,000 or 111,000 square kilometers
incontrovertibility imposing their pitch and yaw, their roll, their sway
over all.
111,111 or 120,000 square kilometers
absolutely shut,
armored about by the ocean,
walled in by sun and water,
their fundamental tradition holding the redoubt in thrall.
Beyond this insignificant hill,
still other heights of no great importance,
an anonymous mound of clods,
the flat wash of waves.
Swirling dust, or a landslide, the mangrove swamp with its untiring itch gnawing, gnawing;
and in the midst of the cloud of dust, of the earth's collapse,
like a nest of leeches, some pitiful huddle of houses, flailed by the wind,
at the edge of boredom and the pasture where the horses graze.
Along the dirt road comes the harsh silhouette of the man and his ox,
beside another man, another ox,
emitting worn monosyllables in a regulation bovine low -
Ah, jail, jail, jail. And on they trudge.
Inside the corral of peeled fence posts
ungainly there flutters a bird
that wheels and returns to its selfsame spot.
You continue on, knowing that out there beyond, the sluggish undulation will
just go on, and on. You come to that place, and climb, descend the hill and
climb, the ill-fitting yoke of the beast
...
Read Full Article
|
