Poetry
Dawn Is a Fisherman
Raymond Barrow · 1958
Synopsis
The poem opens on an image: dawn is a fisherman holding in suspense his harpoon of light. Darkness still covers the sleeping earth like a sparrowhawk that has been cast, and the boats rest on the calm sea like turtles on the nest. The houses greet the last stars, half-awake birds cross the landscape, the cocks sound the alarm like city trumpets; then the sun, a barefoot boy, climbs the curved beach of the sky, calling out to everyone that the day is here.
Context
The poem was published in April 1958 in Caribbean Quarterly, in the issue that celebrated the West Indies Federation with an anthology of West Indian poetry, alongside Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. It opened a triptych in which midday follows, a furious sun charging the city, and then evening over the rivers. Reprinted on its own in 1975 in New Ships, a school anthology of West Indian poems, it then passed into British anthologies of poetry. The newspaper Amandala counts it among the finest poems ever written by a Belizean.
Who it is for
A short poem, in English, that fits on one page and lends itself to recitation; almost every line carries an image.
Prizes and reception
Included in 1995 by James Berry in a collection of classic poems to be read aloud.
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