The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (3 page)

And bury innocence in leaves,

And shatters an enchanted glass,

And cuts the mooring of a kite.

O boy, my nephew, wasting these

As the day spends its coins of light,

Ghost of my growing, sleep, while night

Locks up in dark the light that kills,

Till time, a thief at your barred eyes

Pries open bright interstices.

HART CRANE

He walked a bridge where

Gulls' wings brush wires and sound

A harp of steel in air,

Above the river's running wound.

Natural and architectural despair.

Life was a package in his restless hand,

Traffic of barges below, while wind

Rumpled his hair like an affectionate teacher.

Liberty offered God a match.

Dusk smoked. There was no cure,

The bridge, like grief whined in the air

Marrying banks with a swift signature.

The bums spat, cursed, scratched.

O distant Mexico, Quetzalcoatl

Not, by gum, Wrigley's and Spearmint, and spitting jaws

O the red desert with nomadic laws.

Bye, bye to Brooklyn,

The bay's lace collar of puritan America

And bye, bye, the steel thin

Bridges over barges, the wharf's hysteria,

The canyons of stone.

The whirlpool smiled—“Knowledge is death alone.”

The sea was only ritual, he had

Already seen complexity go mad

In the asylum, metaphor. He stood

From Brooklyn, on the brink

Of being, a straw doll blown

From Manhattan to Mexico to sink

Into that sea where vast deliriums drown.

THE SISTERS OF SAINT JOSEPH

Behind the stained water of the lucent panes, they

Bend their white monotony of prayers,

Their lips turn pages of their meditation,

Selling identity for coins of faith.

A life devoted to whispers. Are they

Secure from doubt, do work and prayers

Postpone the heretic, Thought, the anemic meditation,

Chapped hands and a prayer's palm is all their faith.

Does that one in gardens, cultivating rows of prayers

To the Little Flower, remember Wales or Mayo? They

Are expressionless as gowns, their laughter

Faith makes hysteria, deepening meditation.

Early to rise and hard to die, does the bell's cracked faith

Weary or win, do the young nun's prayers

Offend the wrinkled sister who clucks at meditation

As interrupting cooking? O how assured are they?

Admirable sacrifice, since they are human, that they

Young in direction, bend sapling strong to faith,

Faith. A worn carpet under an old nun's feet, and prayers

A novice's candle nervous with meditation.

KINGSTON—NOCTURNE

The peanut barrows whistle, and the ladies with perfumes

And prophylactics included in the expenses

Hiss in a minor key, the desperate think of rooms

             With white utensils.

Walking near parks, where the trees, wearing white socks

Shake over the illicit liaison under the leaves,

Silent on the heraldic sky, the statue grieves

             That the locks

Have still to be tested, and stores shut up their eyes

At the beggars and hoodlums, when the skin breaks

From the city and the owls, and maggots and lice,

             Strike alight the old hates.

THE WRATH OF GOD
flames like a neon sign on railings, they

Scatter their cargo of sleepless fleas,

The nightclubs wink like sin, and money hushes

             Heals all disease.

By lanternlight the pocomania of the Second Coming when

De Lawd say Him going tyake us by the hand, or in antiphony

A calypso wafts from the pubs, and Ulysses again

             Postpones Penelope.

The theaters are wounded with midnight, and the lymph

Of the innocent and guilty pour from their sides,

The housewife, the young lovers, the soldier, the nymph-

             Omaniac in their tides.

And always to the alone, the stone villas with the prosaic

Essay on façades, wink out their yellow welcomes, one by one,

And down dog-forsaken boulevards, the Arab mosaic

             Of stars, the Morse of doom,

Point some to a wife warm bed, or the arms of lice

Kneeling to the shout in the street, and sleep's equation

Lays the black down with the white, and death at half the price

            Suggests her house.

FROM

In a Green Night

(1948–60)

A FAR CRY FROM AFRICA

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt

Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies

Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.

Corpses are scattered through a paradise.

But still the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:

“Waste no compassion on these separate dead”

Statistics justify and scholars seize

The salients of colonial policy.

What is that to the white child hacked in bed?

To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break

In a white dust of ibises whose cries

Have wheeled since civilization's dawn

From the parched river or beast-teeming plain;

The violence of beast on beast is read

As natural law, but upright man

Seeks his divinity with inflicting pain.

Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars

Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,

While he calls courage still, that native dread

Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands

Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again

A waste of our compassion, as with Spain.

The gorilla wrestles with the superman.

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?

I who have cursed

The drunken officer of British rule, how choose

Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?

Betray them both, or give back what they give?

How can I face such slaughter and be cool?

How can I turn from Africa and live?

RUINS OF A GREAT HOUSE

though our longest sun sets at right declensions and makes but winter arches, it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness, and have our light in ashes …

BROWNE,
Urn Burial

 

Stones only, the
disjecta membra
of this Great House,

Whose mothlike girls are mixed with candledust,

Remain to file the lizard's dragonish claws;

The mouths of those gate cherubs streaked with stain.

Axle and coachwheel silted under the muck

Of cattle droppings.

                            Three crows flap for the trees,

And settle, creaking the eucalyptus boughs.

A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose

The leprosy of Empire.

                            “Farewell, green fields”

                            “Farewell, ye happy groves!”

Marble as Greece, like Faulkner's South in stone,

Deciduous beauty prospered and is gone;

But where the lawn breaks in a rash of trees

A spade below dead leaves will ring the bone

Of some dead animal or human thing

Fallen from evil days, from evil times.

It seems that the original crops were limes

Grown in the silt that clogs the river's skirt;

The imperious rakes are gone, their bright girls gone,

The river flows, obliterating hurt.

I climbed a wall with the grill ironwork

Of exiled craftsmen, protecting that great house

From guilt, perhaps, but not from the worm's rent,

Nor from the padded cavalry of the mouse.

And when a wind shook in the limes I heard

What Kipling heard; the death of a great empire, the abuse

Of ignorance by Bible and by sword.

A green lawn, broken by low walls of stone

Dipped to the rivulet, and pacing, I thought next

Of men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake,

Ancestral murderers and poets, more perplexed

In memory now by every ulcerous crime.

The world's green age then was a rotting lime

Whose stench became the charnel galleon's text.

The rot remains with us, the men are gone.

But, as dead ash is lifted in a wind,

That fans the blackening ember of the mind,

My eyes burned from the ashen prose of Donne.

Ablaze with rage, I thought

Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake,

And still the coal of my compassion fought:

That Albion too, was once

A colony like ours, “a piece of the continent, a part of the main”

Nook-shotten, rook o'er blown, deranged

By foaming channels, and the vain expense

Of bitter faction.

                            All in compassion ends

So differently from what the heart arranged:

“as well as if a manor of thy friend's…”

TALES OF THE ISLANDS

    
CHAPTER I

     
la rivière dorée …

The marl white road, the Dorée rushing cool

Through gorges of green cedars, like the sound

Of infant voices from the Mission School,

Like leaves like dim seas in the mind; ici, Choiseul.

The stone cathedral echoes like a well,

Or as a sunken sea-cave, carved, in sand.

Touring its Via Dolorosa I tried to keep

That chill flesh from my memory when I found

A Sancta Teresa in her nest of light;

The skirts of fluttered bronze, the uplifted hand,

The cherub, shaft upraised, parting her breast.

Teach our philosophy the strength to reach

Above the navel; black bodies, wet with light,

Rolled in the spray as I strolled up the beach.

    
CHAPTER II

     
“Qu'un sang impur…”

Cosimo de Chrétien controlled a boardinghouse.

His maman managed him. No. 13.

Rue St. Louis. It had a court, with rails,

A perroquet, a curio-shop where you

Saw black dolls and an old French barquentine

Anchored in glass. Upstairs, the family sword,

The rusting ikon of a withered race,

Like the first angel's kept its pride of place,

Reminding the bald count to keep his word

Never to bring the lineage to disgrace.

Devouring Time, which blunts the Lion's claws,

Kept Cosimo, count of curios, fairly chaste,

For Mama's sake, for hair oil, and for whist;

Peering from balconies for his tragic twist.

    
CHAPTER III

     
la belle qui fut …

Miss Rossignol lived in the lazaretto

For Roman Catholic crones; she had white skin,

And underneath it, fine, old-fashioned bones;

She flew like bats to vespers every twilight,

The living Magdalen of Donatello;

And tipsy as a bottle when she stalked

On stilted legs to fetch the morning milk,

In a black shawl harnessed by rusty brooches.

My mother warned us how that flesh knew silk

Coursing a green estate in gilded coaches.

While Miss Rossignol, in the cathedral loft

Sang to her one dead child, a tattered saint

Whose pride had paupered beauty to this witch

Who was so fine once, whose hands were so soft.

    
CHAPTER IV

     
“Dance of death”

Outside I said, “He's a damned epileptic

Your boy, El Greco! Goya, he don't lie.”

Doc laughed: “Let's join the real epileptics.”

Two of the girls looked good. The Indian said

That rain affects the trade. In the queer light

We all looked green. The beer and all looked green.

One draped an arm around me like a wreath.

The next talked politics. “Our mother earth”

I said. “The great republic in whose womb

The dead outvote the quick.” “Y'all too obscene”

The Indian laughed. “Y'all college boys ain't worth

The trouble.” We entered the bare room.

In the rain, walking home, was worried, but Doc said:

“Don't worry, kid, the wages of sin is birth.”

    
CHAPTER V

     
“moeurs anciennes”

The fête took place one morning in the heights

For the approval of some anthropologist.

The priests objected to such savage rites

In a Catholic country; but there was a twist

As one of the fathers was himself a student

Of black customs; it was quite ironic.

They lead sheep to the rivulet with a drum,

Dancing with absolutely natural grace

Remembered from the dark past whence we come.

The whole thing was more like a bloody picnic.

Bottles of white rum and a brawling booth.

They tie the lamb up, then chop off the head,

And ritualists take turns drinking the blood.

Great stuff, old boy; sacrifice, moments of truth.

    
CHAPTER VI

Poopa, da' was a fête! I mean it had

Free rum free whiskey and some fellars beating

Pan from one of them band in Trinidad

And everywhere you turn was people eating