My Shelter Island Poem by Jerryman Appiahene Gyamfi

Drunk and weird with curiosity
I departed my beloved Island
To firmly grip this World
Unknowingly pervaded with perversity.
I was hopped and flung like an eland
From this to that grassland
By a consuming hunger for pleasure,
The making of the imagined reality:
A servitude to hedonism without measure.
All to let the then silky young pious
Feel the breeze and heat of life’s nimbus.
I saw nothing but my hideous
Aspirations, desires: scourging envenom
Intruded secretly in my sweet cup of life.
Now, hear them day and night strife
Against the good and incorruptible
Man left who unwearily wars for a win.
Though vain hopes seem inexorable
There exists hope even for a tree:
Cut it down and yet it sprouts a lee
And its own twig will not cease to be;
If its root grows old and its stump dies
At the scent of water it will certainly rise
And produce a bough like a new gland.

Take me, Captain, back to my Shelter Island.