How often do you return?

Rain“Israelites,” Desmond Dekker

Whenever I eat porridge or drink tea.
Whenever the refrain poor me Israelites sounds
and somehow calls up castor oil, gentian violet,
iodine, mercurochrome—all the remedies for all
that could possibly ail you my mother knew.
Anytime I meet someone whose ha-low
are the two syllables it takes for me to suss out
they too are every day returning, who like me
says fi true and yeah man yet keeps marvelling—
Yu really from Kingston? Everywhere I go
where I see a mountain, even lickle hill rising,
am nearish a river or semblance of sea.
Predictable, kinda pathetic. I get it. But true.
Just as when night plays the fool
and a half-way-sorta-warmish breeze sends
late-summer’s flowers climbing ladders of air.
Is so my mind trellises. Is so
trickery abounds, when our one heart
is ragged, and the other runs roughshod over it.