It took a hurricane, to bring her closer
To the landscape.
Half the night she lay awake,
The howling ship of the wind,
Its gathering rage,
Like some dark ancestral spectre.
Fearful and reassuring.

Talk to me Huracan¹
Talk to me Oya²
Talk to me Shango³
And Hattie⁴,
My sweeping, back-home cousin.

Tell me why you visit
An English coast?
What is the meaning
Of old tongues
Reaping havoc⁵
In new places?

The blinding illumination,
Even as you short-
Circuit us
Into further darkness?

What is the meaning of trees
Falling heavy as whales
Their crusted roots
Their cratered graves?

O why is my heart unchained?

Tropical Oya of the Weather,
I am aligning myself to you,
I am following the movement of your winds,
I am riding the mystery of your storm.

Ah, sweet mystery,
Come to break the frozen lake in me,
Shaking the foundations of the very trees within me,
Come to let me know
That the earth is the earth is the earth.

Children often ask me where I get my ideas for writing poems. Ideas come from all around: from things remembered vividly from my childhood; from the natural landscape of creatures and happenings all around me; from things people say; from mythology and dreams; and of course from reading books.

You could say my imagination was first awakened by tropical things, as my early childhood (up to the age of eight) was spent in a small village along the Atlantic coast of Guyana, in South America. Whenever it rained heavily our yard became flooded, and one of the best memories I have of myself as a child is standing in rippling sunlit brown water and watching the shapes of fish go by below the surface. Poems are a bit like fishes to me; each complete in itself, carrying its own living mystery and symmetry.

The rest of my childhood was spent in Guyana's capital, Georgetown, where we'd moved to. [...] Among my favourite books were the ‘William' books by Richmal Crompton. They made me laugh out loud. I also dipped into my father's books of poetry (mostly English poets such as Keats, Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti). I've always been moved by the music and the image-making power of words.

In Come Into My Tropical Garden, my first book of poems for children, published 25 years ago, I tried to capture something of that bright hot ‘floody' world of the village I grew up in, and something of the everyday speech of the people, which we call ‘creole'. Creole is a mixture of English words with the rhythms and bits of the languages of the different people who make up the Caribbean: African, Asian, Amerindian, European, a kind of rich ‘cook-up'.