Written piece
Title / The Lithic Pulse
Rosanna Browne
St Kitts and Nevis
About this piece
This poem honours the Caribbean people's geological, spiritual, and cultural permanence, as well as their historical resilience, drawing on imagery from the volcanic landscape, Carnival, the sea, and the enduring human spirit.
We are the salt-etched basalt that holds the tide, a constellation of anchors blooming through every storm.
We were not carved by gentle hands—but by the relentless chisel of the sea, the hurricane's hot breath, and the weight of centuries pressing down like coral on a sunken thing.
Yet we did not sink.
We took root in volcanic rock, learned the language of the trade winds, built our hymns from the bones of ships and the memory of hands that refused to forget what freedom tasted like.
Our pulse is lithic—ancient, deep, unhurried—beating in the Carnival's drumline, in the fisherman's predawn prayer, in the grandmother's hands kneading flour into something holy.
We have watched empires rise and dissolve like salt in warm water, watched the tide carry away what others thought was permanent, and still we stood— barefoot on black sand, faces turned towards the sun like flowers that have learned that storms are just seasons wearing a louder coat.
We are small islands with unfathomable depths. We are the eye of the storm, untouched by it. We are the conch shell's spiral—ancient, resonant, whole—holding the ocean's voice long after the ocean has moved on.
And when the next wave comes, as waves always do, we will not brace ourselves for it.
We will become it.