The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (18 page)

Iona!

(N'ai dit maman-ous!)

Iona!

(Ous pas ka 'couter moin!)

Trois jours, trois nuits

Iona bouillit, Iona pas chuitte.

(N'ai dit maman-i' ca)

Toute moune ka dit Iona tourner,

C'est pas tourner Iona tourner, mauvais i' mauvais,

Iona!

 

    
IV   IONA: MABOUYA VALLEY

for Eric Branford

Ma Kilman God will punish you,

for the reason that you've got too much religion,

on the other hand, God will bless you,

God will bless you because of your charity.

Corbeau went to Curacao

He sent you money back

You took the same money

and put it in a rum-shop

You can't read, you can't write, you can't speak English,

You should know that rum-shops make no profit,

When Corbeau come back

He had, yes he had money

when he arrived back here,

Yes Mama, Corbeau'll go crazy.

Iona told Corbeau while you were in Curacao

I made two little children, come and see if they're yours.

Corbeau cried out, “Mama, Goodnight ladies and gentlemen

Light the lamp there for me

For me to look at these kids,”

Corbeau came back and said “I know niggers resemble,

They may or may not be mine,

I'll mind them all the same.”

Ah yes, Corbeau then left, he went down to Roseau,

He went to look for work, to mind the two little ones,

Iona told Corbeau, don't go down to Roseau

But he went down to Roseau, and Roseau's whores fell on him.

Phillipe Mago, brought Corbeau a saxophone,

He had no time to play the sax

A saxman just like him took away his living.

Saturday morning early, Corbeau goes into town.

Saturday afternoon we hear Corbeau is dead.

That really made me sad, that really burnt my heart;

That really went through me when I heard Corbeau was dead.

Iona said like this: it made her sorry too,

It really burnt her heart, that the saxophone will never play.

I heard a horn blowing

by the river reeds down there

Sweetheart, I said, I'll go looking

for flying fish for you.

When I got there, I came across Corbeau

He said that horn you heard

was Iona horning me.

The guitar man's saying

We both are guitar men,

Don't take it for anything,

We both holding the same beat.

Iona got married, Sunday at four o'clock.

Tuesday, by eight o'clock, she's in the hospital.

She made a fare, her husband broke her arm,

when I meet your mother I'll tell what you did me.

Iona,

(I'll tell your maman)

Iona

(You don't listen to me)

Three days and three nights

(Iona boiled, she's still not cooked)

(I'll tell her mother that)

They say Iona's changed

It isn't Iona's changed

she's wicked, wicked, that's all

Iona.

 

    
V   FOR THE ALTARPIECE OF THE ROSEAU VALLEY CHURCH, SAINT LUCIA

    
I

The chapel, as the pivot of this valley,

round which whatever is rooted loosely turns

men, women, ditches, the revolving fields

of bananas, the secondary roads,

draws all to it, to the altar

and the massive altarpiece;

like a dull mirror, life

repeated there,

the common life outside

and the other life it holds

a good man made it.

Two earth-brown laborers

dance the botay in it, the drum sounds under

the earth, the heavy foot.

                                         This is a rich valley,

It is fat with things.

Its roads radiate like aisles from the altar towards

those acres of bananas, towards

leaf-crowded mountains

rain-bellied clouds

in haze, in iron heat;

                                         This is a cursed valley,

ask the broken mules, the swollen children,

ask the dried women, their gap-toothed men,

ask the parish priest, who, in the altarpiece

carries a replica of the church,

ask the two who could be Eve and Adam dancing.

    
II

Five centuries ago

in the time of Giotto

this altar might have had

in one corner, when God was young

ST OMER ME FECIT AETAT
whatever his own age now,

GLORIA DEI
and to God's Mother also.

It is signed with music.

It turns the whole island.

You have to imagine it empty on a Sunday afternoon

between adorations

Nobody can see it and it is there,

nobody adores the two who could be Eve and Adam dancing.

A Sunday at three o'clock

when the real Adam and Eve have coupled

and lie in re-christening sweat

his sweat on her still breasts,

her sweat on his paneled torso

that hefts bananas

that has killed snakes

that has climbed out of rivers,

now, as on the furred tops of the hills

a breeze moving the hairs on his chest

on a Sunday at three o'clock

when the snake pours itself

into a chalice of leaves.

The sugar factory is empty.

Nobody picks bananas,

no trucks raising dust on their way to Vieuxfort,

no helicopter spraying

the mosquito's banjo, yes,

and the gnat's violin, okay,

okay, not absolute Adamic silence,

the valley of Roseau is not the Garden of Eden,

and those who inhabit it, are not in heaven,

so there are little wires of music

some marron up in the hills, by Aux Lyons,

some christening.

A boy banging a tin by the river,

with the river trying to sleep.

But nothing can break that silence,

which comes from the depth of the world,

from whatever one man believes he knows of God

and the suffering of his kind,

it comes from the wall of the altarpiece

ST OMER AD GLORIAM DEI FECIT

in whatever year of his suffering.

    
III

After so many bottles of white rum in a pile,

after the flight of so many little fishes

from the brush that is the finger of St. Francis,

after the deaths

of as many names as you want,

Iona, Julian, Ti-Nomme, Cacao,

like the death of the cane-crop in Roseau Valley, St. Lucia.

After five thousand novenas

and the idea of the Virgin

coming and going like a little lamp

after all that,

your faith like a canoe at evening coming in,

like a relative who is tired of America,

like a woman coming back to your house

that sang in the ropes of your wrist

when you lifted this up;

so that, from time to time, on Sundays

between adorations, one might see,

if one were there, and not there,

looking in at the windows

the real faces of angels.

OHIO, WINTER

for James Wright

It's your country, Jim, and what

I imagine there may not exist:

summer grass clutching derailed freight

trains till they rust

and blacken like buffalo.

This winter is white as wheat

and width is its terror, you're

right; behind the clenched, white

barns all afternoon the night

hides with a knife; the road

grovels under a blizzard,

frost glazes the eyelid

of the windscreen, and every barn or

farm-light goes lonelier, lonelier.

THE CHELSEA

    
I

Nothing, not the hotel's beige dankness, not

the neon-flickered drifts of dirty rain,

the marigolds' drying fire from their pot

above a dead fireplace, meant ruin

anymore to him. The mirror's reflexes

are nerveless and indifferent as he is

to fame and money. He will find success

in the lost art of failure, so he says

to the flawless girl framed in the mirror's tarnish.

She's more than the hotel's bronze plaque of greats

who hit the bottle or the street, grew rich

or famous. Their fame curls like layers of beige

paint, just as those mirrored flowers will die.

The clear-eyed girl letting cold tap-water

run on, watches herself watching him lie.

    
II

Between the darkening drapes of the hotel

we'd watch the lion-colored twilight come

stalking up the sandstone, tall

bluff of the West Side Gymnasium,

the wide sky yawning as the tame light curled

around Manhattan, then felt the room fill

with a vague pity, as its objects furred

to indistinction, chair, bed, desk, turn soft

as drowsing lions. Love gives a selfish strength

if lonely lives, down the stale corridors,

still, as they turn the key, nod down the length

of their whole life at slowly closing doors,

In other's hell we made our happiness.

Across the window furnished room and loft

lamplit their intimacies. Happier lives,

settled in ruts, and great for wanting less.

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self,

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love-letters from the bookshelf

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

DARK AUGUST

So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky

of this black August. My sister, the sun,

broods in her yellow room and won't come out.

Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume

like a kettle, rivers overrun, still,

she will not rise and turn off the rain.

She's in her room, fondling old things,

my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls

like a crash of plates from the sky,

she does not come out.

Don't you know I love you but am hopeless

at fixing the rain? But I am learning slowly

to love the dark days, the steaming hills,

the air with gossiping mosquitoes,

and to sip the medicine of bitterness,

so that when you emerge, my sister,

parting the beads of the rain,

with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,

all will not be as it was, but it will be true,

(you see they will not let me love

as I want), because my sister, then

I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,

the black rain, the white hills, when once

I loved only my happiness and you.

THE HARVEST

If they ask what my favorite flower was,

there's one thing that you'll have to understand:

I learnt to love it by the usual ways

of those who swore to serve truth with one hand,

and one behind their back for cash or praise,

that I surrendered dreaming how I'd stand

in the rewarding autumn of my life,

just ankle-deep in money, thick as leaves,

to bring my poetry, poor, faithful wife

past her accustomed style, well, all the same,

though there's no autumn, nature played the game

with me each fiscal year, when the gold pouis

would guiltily start scattering largesse

like Christian bankers or wind-shook-down thieves.

What I soon learnt was they had changed the script,

left out the golden fall and turned to winter,

to some gray monochrome, much like this meter,

with no gold in it. So, I saw my toil

as a seedy little yard of scrub and root

that gripped for good, and what took in that soil,

was the cheap flower that you see at my foot,

the coarsest, commonest, toughest, nondescript,

resilient violet with its white spot center.

MIDSUMMER, TOBAGO

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.

A green river.

A bridge,

scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping house

drowsing through August.

Days I have held,

days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,

my harboring arms.

TO RETURN TO THE TREES

for John Figueroa

Senex, an oak.

Senex, this old sea-almond

unwincing in spray

in this geriatric grove

on the sea-road to Cumana.

To return to the trees,

to decline like this tree,

this burly oak

of Boanerges Ben Jonson!

Or, am I lying

like this felled almond

when I write I look forward to age

a gnarled poet

bearded with the whirlwind,

his meters like thunder?

It is not only the sea,

no, for on windy, green mornings

I read the changes on Morne Coco Mountain,

from flagrant sunrise

to its ashen end;