The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (20 page)

to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows

who his grandfather is, much less his name?

Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados.

    
6
THE SAILOR SINGS BACK TO THE CASUARINAS

You see them on the low hills of Barbados

bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes,

trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails;

when I was green like them, I used to think

those cypresses, leaning against the sea,

that take the sea noise up into their branches,

are not real cypresses but casuarinas.

Now captain just call them Canadian cedars.

But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas,

whoever called them so had a good cause,

watching their bending bodies wail like women

after a storm, when some schooner came home

with news of one more sailor drowned again.

Once the sound “cypress” used to make more sense

than the green “casuarinas,” though, to the wind

whatever grief bent them was all the same,

since they were trees with nothing else in mind

but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave;

but we live like our names and you would have

to be colonial to know the difference,

to know the pain of history words contain,

to love those trees with an inferior love,

and to believe: “Those casuarinas bend

like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain

like sailors' wives. They're classic trees, and we,

if we live like the names our masters please,

by careful mimicry might become men.”

    
7
THE
FLIGHT
ANCHORS IN CASTRIES HARBOR

When the stars self were young over Castries,

I loved you alone and I loved the whole world.

What does it matter that our lives are different?

Burdened with the loves of our different children?

When I think of your young face washed by the wind

and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea?

The lights are out on La Toc promontory,

except for the hospital. Across at Vigie

the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own

promise, to leave you the one thing I own,

you whom I loved first: my poetry.

We here for one night. Tomorrow, the
Flight
will be gone.

    
8
FIGHT WITH THE CREW

It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark—

that was the cook, some Vincentian arse

with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark,

and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn't give me a ease,

like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book,

this same one here, that I was using to write

my poetry, so one day this man snatch it

from my hand, and start throwing it left and right

to the rest of the crew, bawling out, “Catch it,”

and start mincing me like I was some hen

because of the poems. Some case is for fist,

some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife—

this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first,

but he keep reading, “O my children, my wife,”

and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh;

it move like a flying fish, the silver knife

that catch him right in the plump of his calf,

and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white

than he thought he was. I suppose among men

you need that sort of thing. It ain't right

but that's how it is. There wasn't much pain,

just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend,

but none of them go fuck with my poetry again.

    
9
MARIA CONCEPCION & THE BOOK OF DREAMS

The jet that was screeching over the
Flight

was opening a curtain into the past.

“Dominica ahead!”

                          “It still have Caribs there.”

“One day go be planes only, no more boat.”

“Vince, God ain't make nigger to fly through the air.”

“Progress, Shabine, that's what it's all about.

Progress leaving all we small islands behind.”

I was at the wheel, Vince sitting next to me

gaffing. Crisp, bracing day. A high-running sea.

“Progress is something to ask Caribs about.

They kill them by millions, some in war,

some by forced labor dying in the mines

looking for silver, after that niggers; more

progress. Until I see definite signs

that mankind change, Vince, I ain't want to hear.

Progress is history's dirty joke.

Ask that sad green island getting nearer.”

Green islands, like mangoes pickled in brine.

In such fierce salt let my wound be healed,

me, in my freshness as a seafarer.

That night, with the sky sparks frosty with fire,

I ran like a Carib through Dominica,

my nose holes choked with memory of smoke;

I heard the screams of my burning children,

I ate the brains of mushrooms, the fungi

of devil's parasols under white, leprous rocks;

my breakfast was leaf mold in leaking forests,

with leaves big as maps, and when I heard noise

of the soldiers' progress through the thick leaves,

though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran

through the blades of balisier sharper than spears;

with the blood of my race, I ran, boy, I ran

with moss-footed speed like a painted bird;

then I fall, but I fall by an icy stream under

cool fountains of fern, and a screaming parrot

catch the dry branches and I drowned at last

in big breakers of smoke; then when that ocean

of black smoke pass, and the sky turn white,

there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is

an iguana as still as young leaf in sunlight.

I bawl for Maria, and her
Book of Dreams
.

It anchored her sleep, that insomniac's Bible,

a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop's eye

center, from the Dominican Republic.

Its coarse pages were black with the usual

symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish;

an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered

like a butcher chart, delivered the future.

One night, in a fever, radiantly ill,

she say, “Bring me the book, the end has come.”

She said: “I dreamt of whales and a storm,”

but for that dream, the book had no answer.

A next night I dreamed of three old women

featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate,

and I scream at them to come out my house,

and I try beating them away with a broom,

but as they go out, so they crawl back again,

until I start screaming and crying, my flesh

raining with sweat, and she ravage the book

for the dream meaning, and there was nothing;

my nerves melt like a jellyfish—that was when I broke—

they found me round the Savannah, screaming:

All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad.

Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea;

you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared,

so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy,

but all you ain't know my strength, hear? The coconuts

standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki,

they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands,

and all you best dread the day I am healed

of being a human. All you fate in my hand,

ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend,

I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand,

I who have no weapon but poetry and

the lances of palms and the sea's shining shield!

    
10
OUT OF THE DEPTHS

Next day, dark sea. A arse-aching dawn.

“Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.”

The slow swell start cresting like some mountain range

with snow on the top.

                                      “Ay, Skipper, sky dark!”

“This ain't right for August.”

                                      “This light damn strange,

this season, sky should be clear as a field.”

A stingray steeplechase across the sea,

tail whipping water, the high man-o'-wars

start reeling inland, quick, quick an archery

of flying fish miss us! Vince say: “You notice?”

and a black-mane squall pounce on the sail

like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck

of the
Flight
and shake it from head to tail.

“Be Jesus, I never see sea get so rough

so fast! That wind come from God back pocket!”

“Where Cap'n headin? Like the man gone blind!”

“If we's to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!”

“Shabine, say your prayers, if life leave you any!”

I have not loved those that I loved enough.

Worse than the mule kick of Kick-'Em-Jenny

Channel, rain start to pelt the
Flight
between

mountains of water. If I was frighten?

The tent poles of water spouts bracing the sky

start wobbling, clouds unstitch at the seams

and sky water drench us, and I hear myself cry,

“I'm the drowned sailor in her
Book of Dreams
.”

I remembered them ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing

to the sea bed of sea worms, fathom past fathom,

my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing

hold me, trembling, how my family safe home.

Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said:

“I from backward people who still fear God.”

Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward

by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace

from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith

that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel

in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell

sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale,

proud with despair, we sang how our race

survive the sea's maw, our history, our peril,

and now I was ready for whatever death will.

But if that storm had strength, was in Cap'n face,

beard beading with spray, tears salting his eyes,

crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast

to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus,

and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us,

and I feeding him white rum, while every crest

with Leviathan-lash make the
Flight
quail

like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest,

till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail

subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm.

And the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom come.

    
11
AFTER THE STORM

There's a fresh light that follows a storm

while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake

I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion

marrying the ocean, then drifting away

in the widening lace of her bridal train

with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone.

I wanted nothing after that day.

Across my own face, like the face of the sun,

a light rain was falling, with the sea calm.

Fall gently, rain, on the sea's upturned face

like a girl showering; make these islands fresh

as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace,

every hot road, smell like clothes she just press

and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream;

whatever the rain wash and the sun iron:

the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam,

is clothes enough for my nakedness.

Though my
Flight
never pass the incoming tide

of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs

of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied

if my hand gave voice to one people's grief.

Open the map. More islands there, man,

than peas on a tin plate, all different size,

one thousand in the Bahamas alone,

from mountains to low scrub with coral keys,

and from this bowsprit, I bless every town,

the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them,

and the one small road winding down them like twine

to the roofs below; I have only one theme:

The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart—

the flight to a target whose aim we'll never know,

vain search for one island that heals with its harbor

and a guiltless horizon, where the almond's shadow

doesn't injure the sand. There are so many islands!

As many islands as the stars at night

on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken

like falling fruit around the schooner
Flight
.

But things must fall, and so it always was,

on one hand Venus, on the other Mars;

fall, and are one, just as this earth is one

island in archipelagoes of stars.

My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last.

I stop talking now. I work, then I read,

cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast.

I try to forget what happiness was,

and when that don't work, I study the stars.

Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam

as the deck turn white and the moon open

a cloud like a door, and the light over me

is a road in white moonlight taking me home.

Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

THE SEA IS HISTORY

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?

Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,