Lorna Goodison

“This was the grace hour when they existed in dreams as ordinary men and women, free to lie down or get up whenever they wanted. This was the hour before they rose to meet cane. To seed and weed, to cut and harvest it. The hour before some would run away or stay undermine it, withdraw their enthusiasm from it, throw words and sing battering songs, and meet in secret at night to plot bloody overthrow of it. They rode past the time, before cane, when Jamaican people planted mainly corn and cassava, hunted wild boar and coneys, and went to sea in magnificent boats they had fashioned form trees; when their artists made sacred wood carvings that would survive for hundreds of years; when their scientists discovered how to extract poison from the roots of cassava; when they played an early form of soccer and lived mostly in peace, till three leaking ships filled with lost men came towards them bearing Hard Life.”
― Lorna Goodison, From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island