The Place Where I Was Born Poem by Mohabeer Beeharry

Across acres of land, mountains and oceans
Comes the voice of my mother,
The call of an endearing heart,
The place where I was born:

A flower of ineffable beauty,
Born from the torrid embrace of amorous billows
She dances in the laps of churning ripples;

Where the sun never sleeps,
Sunshine like woven garlands of gold
Lay gentle on slumbrous eyes,

Young sugar cane heave in gentle breeze
Hills and mountains vie to kiss the blue sky,
Where birds yodel, trill and choir, merry;
Where the air throbs with the sounds of tambourines.

Full bosomed,
Dressed in eternal green,
Lined with a frill of white sand
And turquoise sea, she blooms
in her sprawling shawl of embroidered flamboyant.

Whose face still haunts me,
After forty years of absence,
The same that cries now and in the past.
Little I knew, when as a child,
I romped down her rivers,
Climbed her trees,
Picking her wild fruits,

Enjoying her hills and mountains
And clinging to her frills of white sand
Little I knew that I would one day leave her
Shores and folds.

I remember my long walks
Lonely and scary through
Furling curtains of thick fog,
After the battering of a marauding storm,
And the pain still lingers.

Remembering the joys she freely gave me,
Here am I now in these lines
Offering my love and devotion at her feet
For no mother was ever born to be like her.