Photo of a sugar mill at the Betty’s Hope plantation in Antigua by Sarah-Anne Gresham, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda.
Colonization renamed everything.
The land.
The mountains.
The flowers.
The dead.
Sugar came first.
Then oil.
Then tourists,
wanting sunsets
and pristine beaches
without history.
But the land remembers everything.
Chains pressed into skin.
Forests split open
for cane fields
to sweeten distant tea.
The tide holding names
history tried to drown.
Nothing disappeared.
It only changed form.
Beneath the resorts,
the cruise ships,
the gated hotels,
the land keeps speaking.
How quickly violence
learned to call itself
development.
Yet,
cassava continues
pushing upward
through abandoned fields,
as if the land
has not forgotten
its people.
Breadfruit trees
outliving imposed governments.
Their roots paying little attention
to polished gates.
The elders among us
still listen.
They know which herbs
survive floodwater.
How to coax food
from exhausted soil.
How to boil bush tea
for grief that has settled
too long inside the body.
At night,
the land speaks loudest.
It asks:
What does freedom mean
if children cannot afford
to remain
where their ancestors are buried?
What does sovereignty mean
when foreign banks
own the coastline?
And still,
communities plant gardens.
As if tending the land
is another way of saying:
We are still here.
empire understands
how to occupy land.
Not how to care for it.
Not how to touch the soil gently,
as one touches
the forehead
of a sleeping child.
Not ownership.
Kinship.
The land remembers.
Those who rise before the sun
to press seeds
into wounded soil,
trusting something living
can still rise from it.
