In the early 2000s, my family was fortunate enough to visit the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean Sea for several Februarys in a row. This morning, I was looking for something to post that would transport readers out of the Lowell snow zone for a few minutes.—PM

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Listening to George’s ‘All Things Must Pass’

I’m on the balcony of Villa 5 notched into the jungle hill,

Where the foil-blue sea seems to slide through railing posts,

The steep angle a visual trick tipping me toward the Caribbean,

Blue like the blue in my son’s eyes that he got from his grandfathers –

This bay-caught blue stretching west to the horizon,

Which is no end at all, just a law of math, the curvy Earth

Converging with sky to make a line where dark- and light-blue meet,

A line that convinced early lookers of the Earth’s flatness,

The end beyond which “there be monsters,” said the old maps,

For the edge appears to be there, even if always moving,

So the best sailor never scrapes the edge or falls off,

But will forever wrap navigational yarns around the blue-green ball,

This improbable sphere holding its own in bottomless space,

The forces and counter-forces swinging the unhinged globe

‘Round the hot-spot Sun in a delicate yet titanic dance

Among other planets, moons, broken plates, and fiery projectiles –

The Sun the same and never the same thing,

Not stopped in time like my memory of the Sun Ray Bakery,

Whose short, fat crusty loaves my mother bought each week

And brought home in the white paper bag printed

With the shop’s name around a red sunburst logo,

A humble homage to our star, not so different in its way

From the desert worshippers of Sun as god,

The Sun that does not rise or sink, no matter how it looks,

The Sun that flames in a self-published burn,

Its flares at times leaping out of the atomic pot,

Crackling enough to scramble our waves –

The Sun no more golden than the sky blue.

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—Paul Marion (c) 2015