Caterbury (12 1/2 Upper King Street)

Other children wanted to see Kingston with its bright lights and teeming markets The contentious noise of cars, and loud rackets Of tongues tattlering their glee To watch the shrewd bargains at the finger tips The clever hands, and the lissom swaying hips Not I, the wind across the lea For each season was school was done, we blown Like mangoes from the trees, had destiny our own And I yearned for a city Different, where the houses are perched on rocks Like one legged cranes, and the banana ship docks And mento music decree The swagger and the mood. Like a vulture's flock My mother's leaning, held sway with pile and stock On cliff face beyond the sea Across the nervous bridge and there the Chinese shop My civilization's edge, and there all bondage stop For we were poor and free What knew my father, with all his fancy pedigree Of this world, he would be too appalled for me His ethics such a bore to me This was my Canterbury, my boyhood freedom, my Only place where children slept and never did sigh. And there each summer I Like the sea tides sigh With my heart kept faith to see my mother, dear The flower of my eye My oasis in the dry Under the toll of the city's awful wear Other children did cry But O never, not I As long as mother climbed the hill, I's be there still Her, black, and patient face Above the rubble's waste Modeling for me, the power of the human will.