I was a girl when I first saw Ramsgate, a flying visit with other brown-skinned people looking for a place to be. The sands were cold, and we wore coats, although it was bright, and the boats in the harbour made musical reverberations to do with the tide and the wind.
Coming from a land of rivers, whose brown waters carried a legacy of slave ships and bones, and huge breakaway logs that escaped the sawmill in a rush to return to the rainforest, I saw nothing on Ramsgate sands to draw me. The channel was just a grey flat expanse of nothingness.
I only knew I was in a different place that was not home.
Issue 6
PELAGIC GRIP
Maggie Harris has published six collections of poetry, three collections of short stories, a memoir, Kiskadee Girl, and appeared in several journals. Awards include The Welsh Poetry Award, the Guyana Prize for Literature, and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.