The commotion can reach you no more. All the fuss of tired souls, the beaten prows of solemn ships that limp from one mud-dune to another can touch you no more, complaining! Brotherman, you slip-away and gone just so easy, easy"at the end of the small hours" all has become translucent and still.

Handsome avatar! Your tall head, the hobby that was your distinguished beard; the world awaking in your eyes; your whole bark was an urgent tree, unstaggering under the lacerations of tenements; under the volatile speech of their yards, the misfortune of weather forecasts; the putrefactions of pettiness, the malarial jealousy, the attrition and the obscene politic of flesh; tumours, genocide, peninsulas with their hydra of lies Unmoored, going, going, gone somewhere Comrade Warner!

Were I alert enough, would I have known a more palpable heart of man! Out there on our vagrant shores, genius persuaded him to labour on ever side of the hour. Earl Warner was everywhere, up and down the archipelago like a compass gone mad seeking the shipwrecked, gathering the voice of these astraying islands.

The effort often flamed in the wholesomeness of his grin with the width of something achieved; he would settle for it, befriend sadness, another mirage with its deaf victory over dreams! Dreams that dream dreams way under these still-green islands, are at once edible palpitations of blood in the murmur of our roots.

Those above in their concrete air-conditioned conscience can bully you to swallow your dreams and be quiet, go tief or be starved to stone. Make you tread their hot pavements while begging low for scraps of bitter hypocrisy. Eat their dirty breasts and tongues, their disdain for art.

Listen, you teams of disgusting cowards, listen to your missals of greed and envy in the sun-face!

Your laughter was a sheer understanding of the plight, a transcendence that repeated stubbornly that under it all you were all right. You drank their poisons.

Your stomach girded in sacred banana leaves did not save you! Yet, with your feet, your hands and your head anointed by that hand, you sang your song. Your marrow mingles with our habit, transforms.

As great as that which proceeds from a uniquely soul-spun sensing for the future of things, you tempered our stage, readied it for selves that will arrive. Earl my friend, artist, believer in the pure promise of these islands, on your lonely flight, gathering distances, tide upon tide upon tide, unrelenting in the surfs scatterings of presences of Caribbeans caribbean.

You belong to a race of courageous men, a divinity that never dies; in there lies the secret advantage of being, the very quest of moving towards something that awaits you to be completed, that perhaps, but only perhaps, will fulfil you!

I see then as I see now, how in the midst of epoch before and epoch after, heaved in turmoil, your heroic soul in its revel and radiance lift the dark, to bring us the most beautiful of birthdays!

For you, the theatre was a friendship, the one of an uncommon thirst for the freedom of Caribbean spirit; a candid climb out of our douendom, beyond the insipid heart-place of envy and gossip, up, up towards the higher in the heights of trees within us, from where the lofty and mighty in cowardice are made pale by the suns in your branches and are thrown back low from their varying foreign grants of "harmful good."

What is new for us is no longer old to you! Caribbean man, Caribbean you, Caribbean me and your mother too! You are a memory of corpses, spread your arms and there are shores of selves resurrected from a blood-green sea of middling passages

We are slow, cursed and unpunctual. Forgive us Brother of wind and rain, of fire and earth bursting with seed, ready for the noble adventure of sowing and of the harvest, when we shall come forth with the Dawn like gold, a triumph to Art!

Ah well, we are just a moment that only appears and seems in our youth, earth-lodged, a sign that time is, that earth is, that man and star, that sun and sky is. Something he carried says to us "the first man and the last." And in that instant the earth, the moon and star, the sun and sky is empty; he gone!

Empty is the "was of any it," the facelessness of a cool breeze, the namelessness of a passing. We who bear witness live, but truly, as in a remembrance; live in that backward and forward turning in your shadowless presence.

Breds, I see myself there where I begin in this not yet named place of wide leafless hours, a mirror without margins, nameless air that devours, sacrificed in the flame of its bloodless unblinking eyes. I plod there, he would say. I am too much for my own blood, how brief the glimpse, and in that breath so final, he was gone!

Now it would seem, more than in any other time, childhood is too short. We grow blurred in the closeness to futures; the idea of death is too intimate a friend; our novice world dies, just a novice in short-bound arms!

We must do what we must, bid another significant artist farewell, that's all.

Let us now also be resolved to prepare for the feasts of tomorrows shaped by him.

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