The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs.

Virginia Woolf. The Waves

When my training was over
they circled my waist with pumpkin seeds
and dried okra, a traveller’s jigida
and sold me to the traders
all my weapons within me.
I was sent, tell that to history.

Lorna Goodison. "Nanny”

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

T.S. Eliot: "The Waste Land"

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

Derek Walcott. "The Sea is History"