Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  of both navies; sails soared to the boatswain’s piping,

  like Seven Seas’s kettle, squadrons would slowly surge

  from volcanic inlets. Its map, riddled with bays

  like an almond leaf, provided defence or siege,

  but its cannons, set in their spiked circle, could blaze

  like the forehead of Mars. Now French, now British yards

  fluttered from its mornes; no sooner was one flag set

  than another battle unravelled its lanyards

  and a bugle hoisted the other. Each sunset,

  with its charred flagships, its smouldering fires, its coals

  fanned by the breeze at landfall, dilated and died,

  every Redcoat an ember, its garrisoned souls

  shouldering their muskets like palm-fronds until Parade

  marched into night’s black oblivion that vizored

  Mars’ brow. Along the horizon in a green flash

  a headland swallowed the sun’s leaf like a lizard

  to the thudding cannonballs of a calabash.

  Then long shadows alternated like the keyboard

  of Plunkett’s piano to the fringed lamp of the moon,

  as the siege and battles were changed to its shawled song

  crossing the sea. Now there were hundreds of Frenchmen

  and British listening in their separate cemeteries,

  who died for a lizard, for red leaves to belong

  to their ranks, for that green flash that was History’s.

  III

  Galleons of clouds are becalmed, waiting for a wind.

  The lizard spins on its tripod, panning, to find

  the boulders below where slaves built the breakwater.

  The Battle of the Saints moves through the surf of trees.

  School-texts rustle to the oval portrait of a

  cloud-wigged Rodney, but the builders’ names are not there,

  not Hector’s ancestor’s, Philoctete’s, nor Achille’s.

  The blue sky is a French tunic, its Croix de Guerre

  the sunburst of a medal. The engraved ovals

  of both admirals fit, when a schoolbook closes,

  into one locket. Screaming only in vowels,

  the children burst out of History. Some classes

  race past the breakwater, the anonymous cairn

  carried by a line of black ants, some up the street

  to crouch under the window-ledge by Ma Kilman,

  to shout at his elbow and frighten Philoctete,

  then yell: “Aye! Seven Seas!” in their American

  accent. One stalks near the growling dog on a bet.

  Their books are closed like the folded wings of a moth.

  The lizard leaps into the grass. You bend your head

  to hear “Iounalo” from the cannon’s mouth.

  Chapter LXIII

  I

  Seven Seas sat anchored in the rumshop window,

  the khaki dog stretched at his feet clicking at flies.

  The Saturday sunlight laid a map on the floor

  and smaller maps on his shades. Hefting the empties

  from the blocko, the girl took them out the back door

  to stack them near the gate. She was Ma Kilman’s niece

  fresh from the country, and the village was for her

  a startling city, its music widening her eyes

  like a new Helen. The dog’s tail thudded the floor.

  The hot deck of the rumshop idled like a ship

  becalmed in Saturday’s doldrums. In the rocker

  Ma Kilman yawned, steering them into deep gossip.

  “Statics is her uncle, the girl. He went Florida,

  after the election, as a migrant-picker.

  You know Maljo. Didier? That man worried her,

  yes, with his outside children plus what he stick her

  with, but this one, my godchild, is legitimate.

  She very obedient. She will make a good maid.”

  “I know Florida,” Seven Seas said. “The life better

  there, but not good. That is the trouble with the States.”

  “Statics change,” she said. “Somebody bring a letter

  home from him. Christine, you go and sit by those crates

  in the yard and call me when the sweet-drink truck come.”

  The girl went out to the yard.

  “A long letter home.

  His job is to put the oranges in a sack

  one by one, as if they is islands.”

  “In the South,”

  Seven Seas said, “the Deep South, you musn’t talk back.

  You do what the white man give you and shut your mouth.”

  “Anyway,” she sighed, “Statics meet this Cherokee

  woman, a wild Indian, you know, and they live well

  together. ‘Good electricity,’ he say. He

  send her photo to his wife, so his wife could tell

  people she know a real Indian, not a West

  Indian. I see the picture and she look real wild,

  not with feathers and so on, but with big, big breast

  like she ready! Which is why I send out the child.

  Aye, aye! Statics send to say one night at a bar,

  a true-true Indian come in and next thing he know

  this Choctaw truck-driver lift him by the collar

  and start choking him, and he tell the woman, ‘Let’s blow,

  babe,’ and leave Statics high and dry like a canoe.

  Statics write to say his woman now is the dollar.”

  II

  Helen came into the shop, and she had that slow

  feline smile of a pregnant woman, the slow grace

  that can go with it. Sometimes the gods will hallow

  all of a race’s beauty in a single face.

  She wanted some margarine. Ma Kilman showed her where

  the tubs were kept in the freezer. Helen chose one,

  then she paid Ma Kilman and left. The dividing air

  closed in her wake, and the shop went into shadow,

  with the map on the floor, as if she were the sun.

  “She making child,” she said. “Achille want to give it,

  even is Hector’s, an African name. Helen

  don’t want no African child. He say he’ll leave it

  till the day of the christening. That Helen must learn

  where she from. Philo standing godfather. You see?

  Standing, Philo, standing straight! That sore used to burn

  that man till he bawl, songez?”

  “I heard his agony

  from the yam garden,” Seven Seas said. “They doing well,

  the white yams. The sea-breeze does season them with salt.”

  He hummed in the silence. The song of the chanterelle,

  the river griot, the Sioux shaman. Asphalt

  rippled its wires, like a harp. The street was still.

  Seven Seas sighed. What was the original fault?

  “Plunkett promise me a pig next Christmas. He’ll heal

  in time, too.”

  “We shall all heal.”

  The incurable

  wound of time pierced them down the long, sharp-shadowed street.

  A thudding wave. The sunlight setting a table.

  And the distant drone of a comet. The sibyl

  snored. Seven Seas sat there as if carved in marble.

  His beard white, his hands on the cane, very still.

  A swift squeaked like a hinge, then shot from the windowsill.

  III

  I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text;

  her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking

  basins of a globe in which one half fits the next

  into an equator, both shores neatly clicking

  into a globe; except that its meridian

  was not North and South but East and West. One, the New

  World, made exactly like the Old, hal
ves of one brain,

  or the beat of both hands rowing that bear the two

  vessels of the heart with balance, weight, and design.

  Her wing-beat carries these islands to Africa,

  she sewed the Atlantic rift with a needle’s line,

  the rift in the soul. Now, as vision grows weaker,

  it glimpses the straightened X of the soaring swift,

  like a cedar’s branches widening in sunrise,

  in oars that are crossed and settled in calm water,

  since the place held all I needed of paradise,

  with no other sign but a lizard’s signature,

  and no other laurel but the laurier-cannelle’s.

  Chapter LXIV

  I

  I sang of quiet Achille, Afolabe’s son,

  who never ascended in an elevator,

  who had no passport, since the horizon needs none,

  never begged nor borrowed, was nobody’s waiter,

  whose end, when it comes, will be a death by water

  (which is not for this book, which will remain unknown

  and unread by him). I sang the only slaughter

  that brought him delight, and that from necessity—

  of fish, sang the channels of his back in the sun.

  I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea.

  Who hated shoes, whose soles were as cracked as a stone,

  who was gentle with ropes, who had one suit alone,

  whom no man dared insult and who insulted no one,

  whose grin was a white breaker cresting, but whose frown

  was a growing thunderhead, whose fist of iron

  would do me a greater honour if it held on

  to my casket’s oarlocks than mine lifting his own

  when both anchors are lowered in the one island,

  but now the idyll dies, the goblet is broken,

  and rainwater trickles down the brown cheek of a jar

  from the clay of Choiseul. So much left unspoken

  by my chirping nib! And my earth-door lies ajar.

  I lie wrapped in a flour-sack sail. The clods thud

  on my rope-lowered canoe. Rasping shovels scrape

  a dry rain of dirt on its hold, but turn your head

  when the sea-almond rattles or the rust-leaved grape

  from the shells of my unpharaonic pyramid

  towards paper shredded by the wind and scattered

  like white gulls that separate their names from the foam

  and nod to a fisherman with his khaki dog

  that skitters from the wave-crash, then frown at his form

  for one swift second. In its earth-trough, my pirogue

  with its brass-handled oarlocks is sailing. Not from

  but with them, with Hector, with Maud in the rhythm

  of her beds trowelled over, with a swirling log

  lifting its mossed head from the swell; let the deep hymn

  of the Caribbean continue my epilogue;

  may waves remove their shawls as my mourners walk home

  to their rusted villages, good shoes in one hand,

  passing a boy who walked through the ignorant foam,

  and saw a sail going out or else coming in,

  and watched asterisks of rain puckering the sand.

  II

  You can see Helen at the Halcyon. She is dressed

  in the national costume: white, low-cut bodice,

  with frilled lace at the collar, just a cleft of a breast

  for the customers when she places their orders

  on the shields of the tables. They can guess the rest

  under the madras skirt with its golden borders

  and the flirtatious knot of the madras head-tie.

  She pauses between the tables, holding a tray

  over her stomach to hide the wave-rounded sigh

  of her pregnancy. There is something too remote

  about her stillness. Women study her beauty,

  but turn their faces away if their eyes should meet,

  like an ebony carving. But if she should swerve

  that silhouette hammered out of the sea’s metal

  like a profile on a shield, its sinuous neck

  longing like a palm’s, you might recall that battle

  for which they named an island or the heaving wreck

  of the Ville de Paris in her foam-frilled bodice,

  or just think, “What a fine local woman!” and her

  head will turn when you snap your fingers, the slow eyes

  approaching you with the leisure of a panther

  through white tables with palm-green iron umbrellas,

  past children wading with water-wings in the pool;

  and Africa strides, not alabaster Hellas,

  and half the world lies open to show its black pearl.

  She waits for your order and you lower your eyes

  away from hers that have never carried the spoil

  of Troy, that never betrayed horned Menelaus

  or netted Agamemnon in their irises.

  But the name Helen had gripped my wrist in its vise

  to plunge it into the foaming page. For three years,

  phantom hearer, I kept wandering to a voice

  hoarse as winter’s echo in the throat of a vase!

  Like Philoctete’s wound, this language carries its cure,

  its radiant affliction; reluctantly now,

  like Achille’s, my craft slips the chain of its anchor,

  moored to its cross as I leave it; its nodding prow

  lettered as simply, ribbed in our native timber,

  riding these last worried lines; its rhythm agrees

  that all it forgot a swift made it remember

  since that green sunrise of axes and laurel-trees,

  till the sunset chars it, slowly, to an ember.

  And Achille himself had been one of those children

  whose voices are surf under a galvanized roof;

  sheep bleating in the schoolyard; a Caribbean

  whose woolly crests were the backs of the Cyclops’s flock,

  with the smart man under one’s belly. Blue stories

  we recited as children lifted with the rock

  of Polyphemus. From a plaster Omeros

  the smoke and the scarves of mare’s tails, continually

  chalked associate phantoms across our own sky.

  III

  Out of their element, the thrashing mackerel

  thudded, silver, then leaden. The vermilion scales

  of snappers faded like sunset. The wet, mossed coral

  sea-fans that winnowed weeds in the wiry water

  stiffened to bony lace, and the dripping tendrils

  of an octopus wrung its hands at the slaughter

  from the gutting knives. Achille unstitched the entrails

  and hurled them on the sand for the palm-ribbed mongrels

  and the sawing flies. As skittish as hyenas

  the dogs trotted, then paused, angling their muzzles

  sideways to gnaw on trembling legs, then lift a nose

  at more scavengers. A triumphant Achilles,

  his hands gloved in blood, moved to the other canoes

  whose hulls were thumping with fishes. In the spread seine

  the silvery mackerel multiplied the noise

  of coins in a basin. The copper scales, swaying,

  were balanced by one iron tear; then there was peace.

  They washed their short knives, they wrapped the flour-bag sails,

  then they helped him haul In God We Troust back in place,

  jamming logs under its keel. He felt his muscles

  unknotting like rope. The nets were closing their eyes,

  sagging on bamboo poles near the concrete depot.

  In the standpipe’s sandy trough aching Achilles

  washed sand from his heels, then tightened the brass spigot

  to its last drop. An immens
e lilac emptiness

  settled the sea. He sniffed his name in one armpit.

  He scraped dry scales off his hands. He liked the odours

  of the sea in him. Night was fanning its coalpot

  from one catching star. The No Pain lit its doors

  in the village. Achille put the wedge of dolphin

  that he’d saved for Helen in Hector’s rusty tin.

  A full moon shone like a slice of raw onion.

  When he left the beach the sea was still going on.

  ALSO BY DEREK WALCOTT

  POEMS

  Selected Poems

  The Gulf

  Another Life

  Sea Grapes

  The Star-Apple Kingdom

  The Fortunate Traveller

  Midsummer

  Collected Poems: 1948–1984

  The Arkansas Testament

  The Bounty

  PLAYS

  Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays

  The Joker of Seville and O Babylon!

  Remembrance and Pantomime

  Three Plays: The Last Carnival;

  Beef, No Chicken; A Branch of the Blue Nile

  The Odyssey

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  18 West 18h Street, New York 10011

  Copyright © 1990 by Derek Walcott

  All rights reserved

  Published in 1990 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  First paperback edition, 1992

  “Yesterday” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney copyright © 1965 Northern Songs Ltd. All rights for the U.S., Canada, and Mexico controlled and administered by EMI Blackwood Music Inc. under license from ATV Music (MACLEN). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

  Acknowledgments are made to Partisan Review, The New Repubic, Frank, Antaeus, and The New Yorker, where portions of this book were originally published, some of them in slightly different form.

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52350-3

  Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-52350-9

  www.fsgbooks.com

  eISBN 9781466880405

  First eBook edition: July 2014