Culebra Lost

How quickly it could all disappear!
And how it is beginning to drive us further into where we hope are impenetrable places,
green secrets at the end of bad roads,
headlands where the next view is not of a hotel
but of some long beach
without a figure and the hanging question of some fisherman’s smoke at its far end.
The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives.
They draw their working strength from it organically,
like trees,
like the almond or the spice laurel of the heights.
Its peasantry and its fishermen are not there to be loved or even photographed;
they are trees who sweat,
and whose bark is filmed with salt,
but every day on some island,
rootless trees in suits are signing favourable tax breaks with entrepreneurs,
poisoning the sea almond and the spice laurel of the mountains to their roots.
A morning could come in which governments might ask
what happened not merely to the forests and the bays
but to a whole people.

Derek Walcott
The Nobel Lecture