THE CAICOS ISLANDS, WEST INDIES
O salt-laden land, with your rocks and your thatch trees,
How oft have I toiled through your tropical wilderness
Though only returning to jaws of Charybdis --
Ephemeral structure, culicidal, chiggeral --
Despite protestation.
O land of the palm and the bush odoriferous,
O home of the sand-fly, and genus anopheles,
Full oft did you haunt me in fever malarial --
Shapes pallid, Walterian, grinning, rapacious --
All horrible phantoms.
O Islands of Caicos -- the last of created things --
With water bacterial, foetid, mephitical;
Eroding the desert with vapours Avernian:
And yet I escaped from a death choleräical,
O marvellous Islands!
O salt-laden land, with your rocks and your thatch trees,
How oft have I toiled through your tropical wilderness
Though only returning to jaws of Charybdis --
Ephemeral structure, culicidal, chiggeral --
Despite protestation.
O land of the palm and the bush odoriferous,
O home of the sand-fly, and genus anopheles,
Full oft did you haunt me in fever malarial --
Shapes pallid, Walterian, grinning, rapacious --
All horrible phantoms.
O Islands of Caicos -- the last of created things --
With water bacterial, foetid, mephitical;
Eroding the desert with vapours Avernian:
And yet I escaped from a death choleräical,
O marvellous Islands!