They Will Take My Island

by Adam Sol


            You taught me language, and my profit on’t
            Is I know how to curse.


They will take my island
            if I don’t scorch it to the bones, though
                        to speak truly,

I did not know it was an island
            until they said so.
                        I thought it was the world.

The river-fish would drift
            into my clasp and I would gnaw
                        on their flesh while the gills still

gasped.  It had edges and pleasures
            and dangers.
                        What more is a world?

Then they arrived with their instruments.
            They taught me so much
                        about my home it became

strange as my body became strange
            when it bloomed.
                        They renamed

the birds after their own birds.
            They taught me to sing for them,
                        and to delight in singing for them.

I watched their plots evolve
            as a monkey watches
                        a jaguar wrestle a snake.

Then one day they gathered on the sand,
            and my princess held the hand
                        of a young god,

and I cursed myself for a fool,
            and the drunk bowed his head
                        and a pig was cooked,

and even I was given
            a piece of hoof to suck on.
                        And they sang a song

and climbed onto some felled trees
            and sailed away to heaven,
                        leaving me

to the wordless noises.  I returned
            to my caves and corners
                        but couldn’t remember
                      
what to hide from.  The jaguars
            had been slaughtered.
                        The fish tasted raw.
                      
I sat on a stone
            and tried to imagine
                        what to think of myself.

                        They will return.
            How can they not return
if they spoke of this place so enchantingly?

                        And how can I not try
            to prevent them, now that
I know it is mine?  How can I not resist them

                        with my very teeth,
            or with the perfection
of a purging fire?  Every sunset
                      
                        I ascend the heights
            of my puny kingdom,
and scan the sea for sails.

They Will Take My Island

by Jason Camlot

They will take my island

to the tip of Florida,

fix it between two flamingos,

and make a Ferris wheel.

They will take my island

to Mount Sinai. Then they will

carry my island back down again.

Then they will smash it to pieces.

They will take my island

to the top of Etna the volcano,

set it over the hole like Achilles’ shield,

and make Freudian repression.

They will take my island

to the coast of the Gaza strip,

near the Bay of Pigs,

in Wii Sports Resort.

They will take my island

to Trader Vic’s in Almaty,

Kazakhstan, and paint it blue

like the tops of mosques.

They will take my island,

they will take my island,

they will take my island,

the revolution will not be tweeted.

They will take my island,

please, baddum-bum,

and serve it as Vaudeville Pie

in Henny Youngman’s kitchen.

They will take my island from my head

and put it in my hands. They will knock it

from my hands and it will roll like an apple

in the schoolyard at recess.

They will take my island

to the Atlantic Ocean

and prepare it for Salt

Water Taffy production.

They will take my island

to Vermont for the weekend,

and when they return it untouched

they’ll call it aloof, cold, autistic.

They will take my island

to the tailor and attempt to measure

its waist and inseam. They will

make my island pants with cuffs.

They will take my island

to the top of the mountain

so that he can see what other

islands look like from above.

They will take my island

to the giant bus depot

and slip it into the giant

coin-op waiting-room television.

They will take my island

to the moon so it can

be the first island

to walk on the moon.

They will take my island

to its first concert at the Montreal

Forum and it will smoke hash

but not feel anything.

They will take my island

to Fantasy Island and it will

learn the folly of its fantasy

to be Fantasy Island.

They will take my island

where it cannot be found

and it shall be missed for a while

and then forgotten.

They will take my island.

Those ones are most inclined to snatch me reef.

Them guys shall enact the seizure of mine isle.

The authorities are going to effect the acquisition of my archipelago.

“They Will Take My Island,”

a Canadian song about love, death,

abandonment, emasculation,

pets, romantic poetry, and Italian food:

               They will take my island.

               They will shoot my dog.

               They will drop my snippies

               somewhere in Ottawa.

               They will take my island,

               from this sorry song,

               hide it in a teardrop

               from the socket of Don Juan.

               They will take my island,

               they will toss it high,

               they will slide it in the oven,

               make a pizza pie.

They will take my island

away from the children.

The children will cry,

“They have taken our island!”

They will take my island,

I will cling to it fast.

I will cling fast to my island.

They will take my island with me.

They will take my island

without good reason.

I will destroy them

with good reason.

They will take my island.

But who are they?

Rabbi Gamaliel says,

“They” in the line

“They will take my island”

refers to they who have not been refined

by an ethics of property, and, consequently,

take unlawfully. Rabbi José says,

“They will take my island”

refers to they who have not

and therefore must take to survive.

This is the true ethics of property.

They will take my island.

The “will” suggests inevitability,

A pre-determined event, unpreventable,

as in, The will of God.

They will take my island,

get it shined up for their price runs,

make a live cause of Mike Tyson

versus Foreman, never mind what.

They will take my island,

touch the sides up without license,

get their fight on, get their knives out,

strike a riot, slyly triumph.

They will take my island,

find a pilot with a lightbulb,

a nice fellow, join his flight club,

crash their plane into a Giant.

They will take my island

but they mightn’t,

had we tightened up the ropes

between the eyelets.

They will take my island

dress it up as NY’s finest,

slide it out of violent ovens so the

Brooklynites can buy it.

They will take my island

and it will become an absence

that has been recorded

in binary code.

They will take my island

and it shall be remembered so long

as there is poetry in the bacterial

cells of SpongeBob SquarePants.

They will take my island

and there is nothing this poem

can do about it, except delay,

or repeat one preordained atrocity.

They Will Take My Island

by Jaime Forsythe

I squeezed everything I could from you,
sand escaping your collar, miniature horses
circling your sternum. You swung me
to sleep, then hollered all night
with the crows and the faucets.
I forgot my second-last home
under a blue net, was rescued
by nets and trapped by nets,
wrestled with rope, lifted silk
hauls of fish. I opened my arms.
I curled into nothing until I turned
into a shell. People forgive
themselves for more than this.
They will descend on roads
that hug the markets, charms
trembling from rearview mirrors.
They will crack the husks.
Like me, they will take what they can.


  

They Will Take My Island

by Evie Christie

Over there was a father, a father's things, here

thick folds of fresh cut hair, piss, the cool ceramic.

This a girl's thigh, that patchwork quilt, a bare breast.

There you'll find a keyhole, the violence

of oak, a bare eyeball (your own eye!). A mother's hard-

wired palm.

Where can you exist? Sure, there's the matter

of birthright: they planted your brother's brain in that plot,

lost your father around here somewhere--you might track

his glass eye with your molars

in an electrical storm.

Is there space for you? Finger the map, lose

yourself here: this is an eye, mid-blink, the first

pulse of blood in your hand cocked dick, and this, your boyhood

room. Get lost

with them: the breasts and eyes (made

up), the perfumed thighs.

What did they find in the walls

of that artery, the locket's autopsy,

the shotgun's lovestruck path?

In this ballpark, a wisdom tooth,

a brassy band, a vow and this

was your island. They will take my island, too.

They Will Take My Island

by Johanna Skibsrud

i. Chagos Archipelago

ii. Map: Christmas Island

iii. Floor plan: Imperial War Museum, London, UK.

They Will Take My Island

by Nancy Jo Cullen


Of course there was blood, that was a given
We told each other everything and
She ate my teeth
It was a metaphor so we laughed & etc. until
The children returned

We had to put on our clothes
The children wanted supper, or maybe they wanted wireless plans
After we left the grassland the children didn’t care
For naked desire abstractly expressed or
Mother’s milk

Take the text but not the poetry, not the struggle
To say something true in the wild blue yonder:
That we are servants to the crush of the vernacular
That the children are leaving
That this land is your land, Yours
And we are post-peripatetic, post-menopausal

Take your bit of rock
We will lace our fingers and float down the river
Plump and savage outside the realm of the sacred
A fox will track the progress of crones
Kissing in the water

They Will Take My Island

by Stephen Rowe

            and gift it away in a flutter of progress:

fold it in coloured paper like an origami crane,

a creature of bluest possibilities stood wading

where waves once stroked the shore;

            it will satisfy their ends as only

the passive can: a coastal zoo complete with

animals, quaint inhabitants, seaside villas

toured with a view of tomorrow in the offing;

            a bird aimless in the sea with a wake

broad as a five hundred year history,

each day thoughts of its hatching misting over

in the thickening fog of the North Atlantic.

            And the heart’s continental shelf

with its depths of longing; that legacy demands I

fold a thousand origami cranes of my own,

a siege of paper swarming crests of white, of blue.

They Will Take My Island

by David Seymour

I’ve grown obsessed with keeping things preserved,

folding bedsheets crisply as unread books, attending

churches built so sublimely Jesus would dismount

the cross and grab communion if he could. He believed

in eternity. If I shift my gaze with simplicity and without

aspiration to familiar souls and objects I can stare for

hours and none of them will change. That which moves

away from me isn’t necessarily afraid and that which

moves toward me is not always in love, I’ve learned

to say with a quieter honesty, surrounded as we are

by the cavalcade of powers and lights and agencies

some of which I’m for but also those of which

I am against, it being a happy coincidence I can be

both at once. Of happiness, I forget what I have done

and imagine other names for it. They have many

likenesses, are each alike, like most of what’s beyond

my grasp. They’re nameless as seconds. They’ve taken,

in their inane, fog-like disregard for details, the bulk

of what’s transpired. Once I could conjure, and no

They take it without prejudice. They’ve confiscated

my recklessness also, replaced it with refinement of taste.

They take their time. But they musn’t take

my island. Though I don’t live there anymore

it’s all I have left to remind myself. Of myself.

The weather today is exactly as I remember it

yesterday, and the week before. I’m convinced

that this is remarkable, that this light breeze is here

while the island remains, is theirs but wondrous,

because it is. It is a perfect day for a swim.

They Will Take My Island

by David McGimpsey

They will take my island because they're young
and it was either that or listen to Stacey's story
about how Bill was, you know, all like that --
really, what else were they going to do?

They will take my island and rename it
in a few mumbles. The nomenklatura
of their pamphlets and updates will insist
I'm having sex with Sarah Palin.

Soon, I will not be able to do much
but type smh (shaking my head)
because my eyes will be the eyes of a termite
seeing only Dr. Oz's disapproving stare.

I'm still glad for all the good-lookingness.
Got ninety-nine problems but Amaryllis
ain't one. Through river marsh, then birch forest,
up a granite hill, is where I'll be buried. 

They Will Take My Island

by George Murray

1.

The surf arrives at the shore and seems to retreat.

A change in perspective has it neither coming

nor going, but rather lying still and panting

on the sand and rocks in rhythmic breaths, like a man

prone on a couch—a baby asleep on his chest—

eyes open to the ceiling, counting the pulses

time makes in his ears, every thought a wasted thought

because he cannot move, cannot lift a hammer,

cannot forge a notion over dead embers.

A living for living's sake—the linear flows

of blood and time a façade of always going

forward—or pushing from behind in a closed loop.

Every blink, every twitch, every sweet squeak and shift

in position, every everything—these pieces

of time slide away, but don't go anywhere.

The waves arrive and arrive, without end.

2.

He looks up, past the child's head, wonders if the couch

is a kind of shore, if the ceiling makes a good

last horizon. He's where home has become itself,

and won't cease being itself, like a second hand

ticking, like a surf rolling. There's a vibrating

recognition of time—the physical, fleeing

ticks from a clock not of this room, revealed in blasts

of blood through his ears. The blue troughs of his veins lie

like aqueducts in hillsides of still muscle,

pushing in pulses against the skin, his eardrums,

the couch, the baby on his chest—his heart knocking

on the ribs in a time designed to soothe, every

breath from the boy's nose in harmony with his own

quivering air—rising now, then not—unhurried

bellows exhaling on some slow, well-contained fire.

Knock, knock. Knock, knock. Knock, knock. Please, let me out. 

3.

Time piles up on him in expectation, even

as it slips away in ambition. The child lies

cheek-down on his chest, an important paperweight,

rock on his living beach—or a black spot among

the stars, a hot singularity into which

all his light falls. And despite his hollow witness—

the systems laid out in ceiling cracks like massive

drains down which he gets sucked in spirals, clockwise

down towards the Undone, which is the Undoing—

he knows he won't trade this accident victim's view

for any other. Another couch or castaway

beach, another blank ceiling would only offer

another site for the same ticking in his ears.

Below his chin a fontanel throbs like the sea—

a small extra shot at life matching his own knocking

blood—the surf that neither comes nor goes.

They Will Take My Island

by Jacob McArthur Mooney

for Michael Bates, Prince Regent of Sealand

I am the prince of a pirate's clutch of paper,

plucked from the shucked off vestments of Empire.

Squatters rights will set your bones. Relax.

Knit a flag. Turn your music up real loud.

It's inside us all to be ridiculous and kings.

They will come to take the island that my father

took from them, the island that they cobbled out of pure

army ugly, then pushed off the edge of British waters.

At the Micronations Conference, we proctored

our relations. Everyone agreed to recognize

ambassadors. Trade relations were established

with a commune in Kentucky. We ate cake to celebrate.

Say the word and slip your citizenship. Be loose

or libertarian, uncoil the go-fuck-yourself inside of you

for borders. Produce an heir. Make the papers.

Blather you way into wars and cult support.

I live on the mainland. It rains every day.

My father's left for Spain. A fire burned for weeks

with no one there to put it out. The courts are cooing

for our novelty. Seagulls shit on our deck.

They will take my island, preserve its name

in comedy, in the smirks of London papers.

The wings of Britannia will open up above us.

They will bury us in leaflets and logic and The End.

They Will Take My Island

by Chris Banks

beginning with a line by Larry Levis

My love and I are inventing a country

without people, or a need for people.

There are no cities and no governments.

Everywhere is blue sky and cold rivers

and enough sunshine to warm ourselves.

We are not old and will never grow old.

No vanity and no arrogance derail our lives

in this country of our creation. That is,

unless my love were to leave me here

in this country where walking across it

I should eventually come to its watery edge

and see it as an island for the first time

knowing she has taken my island from me.

They Will Take My Island

by Chris Hutchinson

After a thread of milky light splits his mother’s abdomen, there is no one on the island to address. Lichens ice his toes. His solar-plexus writhes, a pinwheel twined with serpents. Only a reflection attends his grief—that marshy countenance which beguiles the mooncalf with wavering. So words, he thinks, do no more than just appear, and their images are merely place holders for the senses. But how else will he invent a world, or provoke his erudite, self-affronting host? Let’s say the ocean mingles with the shore, sidles up, flashing the silver of its thighs. Let’s say all metaphors are lies—a cross between the apotheosis of desire, and the starved mind’s sharpest trick. He imagines vast rolling swells, and a galleon fleet, masts slow-motion scrawling ciphers on the sky’s frayed parchment. Is he a sorcerer now, or has he been too long alone? Poor Caliban. Hagseed. Enter the castaways, staggering dumbly ashore, streams of saltwater gushing from their throats.

They Will Take My Island

by Darren Bifford

Paul and I consider Gorky’s 1944 They Will Take My Island.

This is Paul’s favorite work in the Art Gallery of Ontario.

He brings me to it after we see Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents.

There’s a lot to admire about Rubens’ Massacre of the Innocents.

In a way it’s my favorite painting in the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Something about it reminds me of They Will Take My Island.

The soldiers are so intent on killing all the babies, no island

exists in the Pacific they will not discover, nor in Ontario

for that matter. They say people borne of islands are innocent.

No work of art hangs on their walls. History walks around innocent

in circles, saying let’s begin again and again. The British in Ontario;

the French in Quebec, expect for Gauguin who sails for Islands

where he will live naked and gaudy as he imagines men do on islands

civilization skips. Even here under the cities and roads of Ontario

you’ll find tracks and bones: it’s true none of us here are innocent.

Which reminds me of Gorky’s 1944 They Will Take My Island.

I see my great-great grandfather with a cross and level in his hands.

Listen to the crowds roar! There are no tigers in the land of Ontario.

Herod’s soldiers sail ashore. Every creature in the forest is an infant. 

They Will Take My Island

by Robert Earl Stewart

The gate of your ribs pulled open tonight.

Your chest bleeding some kind of searchlight.

It picks up the grey gull of a boat against the darkness,

the landing party lit white as embers.

You cannot see the man who lies in the hold

on a dune of dried fruit spilled from crates.

It’s as dark as the centre of the sun down there; his thirst

as bright as the centre of that darkness.

Sometimes he looks like that guy you know—

that guy with the boat and the card game.

But most of the time he just looks like the admiral,

locked away in disease from his horde.  

It smells like birthday candles where we watch

from the shore. The lamp in your chest has gone out.

The shorebirds hold their eggs inside like the future,

like a new, dark beach before the prow. 

They Will Take My Island

by Claire Caldwell

After the tourists left, we made a map of Venice

with black licorice. It snowed that year, and our father

painted dead fish in the markets. We took turns

trailing feral cats and ladies draped in winter furs.

The canal slithered past the cobblestones, sleek

as a silver chain. Mother cursed the water

in her bones. My brother built forts for his

glass animals, too young still for the cartoleria

where the man with marbled eyelids told fortunes.

I delivered his ink on Sundays. He stamped my feet

before reading their soles. Our island won't sink
if it's sailing, he'd say every time. I chose to believe him.

They Will Take My Island

by Catherine Graham

Scuttle in the blood cells,
they seed the white beach, crawl
sideways under the skin
with a belly-skeletal undertaking.
Pincer-caught without pain,
they labour up a rogue wave
of metastasis to make the spreading endless.

They Will Take My Island

by Robin Richardson

With slant-eyes, beards and breakable

demeanors they will claim the dust,

sheets, pleated dress, the furnace that

mutters grumpy where I sleep.

Their boots will take the hardwood,

blue clamp of conversation while

I pour myself a drink. The books

will stack self-conscious, spines

will arch and fingers aim to slink

across the grind. They will pine

for morning toast, dalliance

of daylight at the sill; Its coming

and going and showing up the quiet

with a cricket-fiddle; stark and hardy.

They will echo in the hallway, stay

a sliver on the rocks-glass. They will

want the writing, haunt the paper

with their harks and clever inching

inward. They will lift the covers, cull

the frantic musing with their firmness.

They will take my island.

They Will Take My Island

by Gary Barwin

after Leigh Nash & Natasha Nuhanovic

inside, godlike

the eyes of a ukulele

a smaller goodbye

a diplomat’s first duty

to strum

goodbye, ukelele

stray-dog guitar

only a small song

when all we have is shore

They Will Take My Island

by Paul Vermeersch

after Arshile Gorky

My loves are coming. Whether on a raft, or a frigate,

or a longboat with its serpent figurehead,

its sails billowed by whirlwinds, they are coming to my island. 

She is with them, the love of my childhood.

She was a foal lying silently in brown leaves.

She will be something different now,

a stranger to my island, and yet the leaves

are already withering, already falling to the earth in preparation.

They must navigate whirlpools and crushing straits,

but still my loves are coming in a cold white spray. 

They make for my island, and the love of my youth is with them.

She was a young woman in a field of honeybees.

Their droning was loud, but they would not sting her.

The field and her hair are one, and the field 
goes behind her like a floral train.

I can see her only like this, and not as she might be now,

in accordance with a pact made long ago.

All my loves are coming to my island. The first love

of my manhood is with them.

She had the head of a boar and a girl's quick laugh.

And the second love of my manhood, a scarlet ibis, 
cruel as a lizard’s eye, is with them too,

but she might turn back before they reach my island.

And the love of my life is with them. 
She will introduce herself in my native tongue, 

saying, You need not fear me,

and she will lead all my terrible loves

to this shore, and together they will take my island.