A Bend in the River / The waste Land

At one end of the cleared area were thatched huts; the place had become a fishing village again. The sinking sun shot through layers of grey clouds; the water turned from brown to gold to red to violet. And there was the steady noise of the rapids, innumerable little cascades of water over rock. The darkness came; and sometimes the rain came as well, and to the sound of the rapids was added the sound of rain on water.
Always, sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rains and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilac flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it 'the new thing' or 'the new thing in the river', and to them it was another enemy. Its rubbery vines and leaves formed thick tangles of vegetation that adhered to the river banks and clogged up waterways. It grew fast, faster than men could destroy it with the tools they had. The channels to the villages had to be constantely cleared. Night and day the water hyacinth floated up from the south, seeding itself as it travelled.

V.S.Naipaul in A bend in the River

April is the crullest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers
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Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust
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'You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.'
- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
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T.S. Eliot in The waste Land