Selected Poems

by Cunard, Nancy; Parmar, Sandeep;

  ‘It ends with this, the Grand Approach,

  It ends in Chile, with freedom.

  Look! Here is the miracle,

  And light on the miracle;

  The light, you can almost touch it.

  A cactus grows in the snow here, when it is the time of snows.

  Look! These are cacti in the deep of the bend…

  Look! Here are horses and no man near them,

  For the horses here, they are wild, they are wild, they are free.

  And then the great line of the summits, look, at the top of the curve,

  Older than all the gods of earth, surging up at one go,

  One higher than all the rest – all saying ‘Eternity’.

  Can we please leave our pain at the foot here, of the eternal snows

  Where the highest says “Behold me: I am Aconcagua”?’

  How many miles have we come? Here are no miles, only time,

  Only continuance and colour mating with colour.

  And then a note says:

  ‘Gluck in a field composed, sometimes,

  In a green field, on his piano, with golden wine

  And birdsong and wind over flowers, and made such rhymes

  And waves of sound all hearers wept with ecstasy…’

  Why do I think of Gluck here – it is because of that, the ecstasy.

  The Andes are singing to me; they are sound made visible, there are words even in a message,

  They pull me, they hold me, they say: ‘Stay, you are part of us’.

  And where are we now? In Uspalláta, the sole man-made in all of this,

  A tawny road reeling, an inn with waters and the sauce lloròn.

  It is almost noon, and the car bounds on again –

  And then and then, tell me my note, what did you say?

  ‘I have seen noon here, noon burst open in all its colours,

  Colour, eternal as stone by the Tomb of the Inca –

  The colours change every few miles…

  There is water here too, the Rio Mendoza.’

  There is water…Here raged the waters of avalanche, the aluvión.

  Destruction monumental on a scale with the Andes,

  A few years back. And the driver said: ‘Here too

  Passed the armies of Liberation, General San Martin, and the emancipation of the two countries

  From the tyrant Spain.’

  And my last note says:

  ‘What is the frontier, tell me?

  The Pass to Eternity –’

  The journey is near its end – height carved out in rock, ridge upon ridge,

  A little train in a world of stone, descent into a green world, trees, maize and water;

  You are in Chile, mijito, you have reached the Promised Land –

  All life is a long or a little train,

  And weary the heart, the footloose heart, the Spanish heart

  In its cell, beating and waiting, beating and waiting.

  Take freedom today oh heart – for as to me

  These things I saw them through a veil of pain…

  Of pain, of pain – Ah how it comes

  Repeating with a pulse of drums,

  And seldom does their rhythm still –

  Drums for the knife that’s mate to love;

  Love is my fate, love is my ill,

  My inmost meaning, utmost loss,

  My spring, my lock and key, my wild

  Ninth wave that rages round your stone –

  These things are nothing to you, child,

  Maker of pain, undone by pain,

  Or are they?

  And must the tide and temper of it surge ever so?

  Torero, what is your answer?

  Or will these eternities we cross give me one?

  This is what happens at the meeting of two elements –

  There is pain and ferocity, and a measure of love.

  What have the drums to do here in Eternity?

  Intrusion of Europe’s heartache, pain has come with us

  And travels this road too in his swathe of grief,

  And faces Aconcagua…

  Thus we entered the land of the Condor.

  The Chilean Sonnets

  1

  Chillán

  Innumerable Pompeiis of the world,

  This is your limbo, past and yet to be –

  Between these wraths and rains and bumping sea

  Man’s hates and furies thrive – with courtesy

  Out of forgotten Spain. But what is furled

  Here in the rock is rock’s, not for you, man.

  Was it worth while, Conquistador? Chillán

  Answers: Behold. The latent vagary

  Of quakes commands – come flood, come June – at call,

  Omnipotent, and triumphs the roto’s will

  In drunken heart’s ease… Ah this Chilián still,

  This vat of drink to the lees… Then in it all

  One poet issuing from that January tomb,

  Experience gotten there for future’s bomb.

  2

  Amaranth of Sunset

  Done, undone, not done, and done too well –

  Oh Chile of my despair, oh orb of thieves,

  Oh whirlpool madness – oh you curious hell

  Of love and hate, you cradle of all that grieves.

  All Shakespeare vested in one small drunk man,

  All of the poets in this love of mine,

  All of the sorrows on that raft of wine;

  Was this the man for me, the final man,

  Who knows? Gone – to the amaranthyn last

  Shaft as he watched it muttering ‘Never more…’

  I see my poet walking by the shore

  Of time alone as I, locked in our past,

  Snarling, quiescent. And then up speaks the wine:

  ‘You to your life, mijito; I, to mine.’

  3

  At Dawn

  No! I will sit and let the iambics play,

  And I will wring the sonnet’s neck and say

  ‘Hell and eternity have met today

  Here – and I, I defy them – come what may,

  A stranger in your land, not more, at bay.’

  And who has ears may listen if so he list,

  Nothing will gain, oh nothing; (‘amethyst

  That keepeth away the fumes of wine’, they say).

  I will not talk or answer. All of my sphere

  Lingers or centres on love that’s gone, or here,

  How can I tell, here in this transient room?

  All is a lie, up to the uttermost tomb.

  Nor would I know if all is done and lost –

  Dawn is for ice, not for computing cost.

  Psalm for Trinidad

  I am Trinidad – Columbus discovered me,

  Land of the Carib then, land of the palm trees, humming birds,

  I am Africa, India now; gone are slaves and indentured labour,

  The sons of these am I, the wage-serfs, under a still-Victorian Union Jack.

  (Oh de sun de sun ha laash me; it 96 in de shade.)

  I am Oil and the reek and muck of it, the wage lost in the strike,

  The worker’s rotten barrack, the crusted, festering yard

  Where life’s not life but simply a six-score hard

  Under a tin roof, five or six to a room; life is a sentence here.

  80 cents, 60 cents, 50 or 35’s my daily pay…

  Slums of Empire – have you seen me, Lloyd George, to be calling me that?

  (What to do wid dis sun? When it not sun in come rain.)

  I am Butler, Uriah Tubal Buzz Butler of the Oilfields,

  A brown Negro man who wanted to make it a better life,

  Started organising, spoke out, was jailed for it – with the Governor saying: he is right,

  And the Oil Co.s working the police, and the Governor sent away.

  (Oh Gawd, oh Gawd, what he do, Butler? Butler must come again.)

  I am the cane-break
, the largest sugar-factory in the Empire,

  Thin silent folk of India in those fields, dividends, engineers,

  Bullock-carts, piety – brown hands splitting the golden cocoa-pods,

  African faces in green depths, silent too, wondering ‘how long dis way?’

  (40 cents, 20 cents – depend if I man or woman – it so, my day.)

  I am Government House on its official lawn

  Facing the Savannah – mine is no easy dawn.

  I am Censorship suppressing, controlling, because here there is always fear…

  I am the white creole, the planter, paramount among the snobs,

  I say it’s a happy island, my summum bonum is the cocktail hour.

  I am the Police Force and helmeted Colonialism rampant and dominant.

  (Here it get thirty days me for pick one fruit by roadside.)

  I am Calypso, brown bards of the people improvising irony in song;

  I am the multitude, the articulate, keen

  Brown face and black and gold; the courteous Chinese

  Trading in the towns, Indians passing mute almost ghostly;

  I am the young hotheads, the cackle of old dark laughter, the ripe vernacular on the roads…

  (What about after de war, man you think it come the Democracy?)

  I am Duprés, O’Connor, Gomes, Percival and Payne,

  I am ‘The People’, the battling mayor of Port of Spain,

  I am Kay and ‘New Dawn’, you can read the truth of me in this;

  I am Gittens and Comma, brains that hold the import and savour of me.

  (Now dese friends for true, in deir writings, deir oratory.)

  I am Rienzi, walking between diplomacies,

  Politics, politics – the burden sits heavy on me.

  I am the poet Cruickshank, my Wordsworthian line

  Sweeps oer the world and sculpts it, and I have done my time

  In Colour’s gusty battles. I am the anonymous force

  Of human will, of hope for juster days soon.

  (After de war, like for England for Trinity.)

  I am the Iron Music, the fork on the bottle with the spoon,

  The drum out of Africa, the tambu-bambu, the collective Carnival;

  Always always a note of sadness under the singing,

  Always a wistfulness, an uncertainty, a back-bringing…

  (Dis Carnival here, it our onliest own time in de year.)

  I am this voice in the night – (heard heard in the street):

  ‘Dey call it New Year’s Eve – Man, what new year is dis for we?

  Workin’ man can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t live properly;

  Dis place it have nothin’; dis night it nothin’ new for you or me..’

  (New Year, Old Year, all de same for such as we.)

  Trinidad, effervescent ---------

  look at me, look at me, look at me here.

  ‘How Long?’ Is Not ‘For Ever’

  Come look at us, islands that the Carib tide

  Bathes with eternal swell; us, cocoa, palms,

  Sugar and pitch and rum and oil – and psalms

  Learned under slavery, pulsing yet inside

  Men’s toilsome breast and woman’s. Come eventide

  Their angelus outdoes the facts of day;

  My dears, you are too good – ‘please-God’ – you pray

  For that which is your due, and facts outride

  All God-ward hopes. Yet ‘God is our onliest friend’

  You say to me. I know this too shall end

  When the world’s comrades muster to your side;

  The planet’s workers and the poet’s pen,

  Take them for allies – Truth is a rising tide –

  My Africans, an answer comes to ‘W h e n ?’

  Less Than the Slave

  She stood breast-high…yes, that is it, breast-high,

  Faith with a cutlass armed in the still wood,

  Amid the alien…yes, transplanted; stood

  Saying ‘If God spare life this ends, and I

  Need work no more for twenty cents a day!’

  Lily! You knot from Africa! You thing

  Less than the slave of old – fill baskets, bring

  Cocoa and coffee; pick those beans; they’ll weigh.

  So – you are worth two dimes, and men worth four

  In those Antillian glades. Black, ragged, bowed

  With agues, tired, illiterate – see their crowd

  Dancing the cocoa on the drying-floor,

  Democracies? Not here! IS as HAS BEEN –

  Rulers, behold the sweet in your machine.

  In answer to Trinidad’s poet who asks me

  ‘…What was it moved you to enlist

  In our sad cause your all of heart and soul?’

  To Alfred Cruickshank

  My friend, ship rocks, and seas come great and small

  Over the gunwale, but the captain reads

  On, despite this. On land the teeming seeds

  Breed without fear, and after the gusty fall

  Of rain comes ready are they, present, erect,

  Grown. Do you sense the symbol in it all?

  The man outlives the storm, the tribunal

  Of nature judges, tempering the elect.

  Our lives are wars – You ask: ‘Why love the slave,

  The ‘noble savage’ in the planter’s grave,

  And us, descendants in a hostile clime?’

  Call of the conscious sphere, I, nature and man,

  Answer you: ‘Brother, instinct, knowledge… and then

  Maybe I was an African one time.’

  14 Juillet 1941

  In the trough of the wave, in the pit, the very nadir

  Of all – what’s in your sack, Time, for the likes of we:

  Fortitude, perseverance, defeats, suspense most horrible, then more endurance?

  Best that we cannot tell – or would I rather see

  The heart of the blackness bared, the ultimate, present whole

  At its closest, the total corruption in the skull?

  More and more communal is man’s grief – yet each tragedy is solitary –

  Europe, you sea of pain – how long is this tide at its full?

  Fragment in the Old World

  Here comes an angry little moon,

  A russet bauble in an indifferent sky –

  Who wrote ‘It may be Prester John’s balloon’,

  And who ‘Theirs not to think but do and die?’

  Oh fitful quotes, your strophes ring like the hours,

  Be gone, and let me get my furrow straight –

  Oh quotes that want to glove each circumstance

  And lead the poet to your Walpurgis dance,

  Be gone.

  Gin we drink from weariness,

  Gin we drink through dreariness,

  Metal-mouth gin, desist – serve us no quotes today.

  ‘Theirs not to think…’

  In Lybia, Penang, or the old imperial sequence –

  But theirs to think and do in Russian snows…

  Incarnations

  This was the kind of man with his hands on the tiller

  Of the little old ship riding wave like a cockle or rocket,

  Landing in deep surfs, beaching her sharply, then striding forward

  Questing or conqueror over the frozen turf of the north.

  He stood on the tops of hills and arid summits

  In most extraordinary dawns that started the tremendously long day with a ritual –

  Days longer in ventures than sunlight –

  And he would always be planning and thinking

  ‘What is the best we can do with these new ones,

  For them as well as us… amalgamate this handful of people…’

  He was a kind conqueror,

  Knowing strength and sanity and the balance of heart, mind and

  hand.

  Finally the day would come to an end. Then he would lie down
/>   In the sheepskins and bearskins and the imported arctic feathers

  Of breasted duck and teal, the gold head easy in all this brown and rose

  For a little, with a primitive lute-string

  Somewhere near, being played for sleep by a heap of hot embers;

  All of this very warm in the improvised huts of conquest and in the home castles.

  The shadows were huge then, and the drink strong, very strong;

  Was it athelbrose or ale or mead or the berry from the woods…

  Whatever, it was made rich and strong, for the transports of strong tired men.

  And in the splendour of blazing logs

  Winked a power of great stones, precious ones, with the

  far-travelled amber amongst them.

  The man sat, thinking and planning still, at the head of the table, silent,

  While the new things were brought in from the outlying provinces,

  And a message about gold, with news of further tradings,

  And pondered while the rest toasted conquest: ‘What is the best way t use all this?’

  And then, after a few centuries,

  He is one of two in the interview of two kings –

  Look, the same head, eyes that appraise, analysing,

  The same build, the same muscling, the poise;

  A leader, a poet, one for the arts, but also for statecraft,

  One that honours line and the shapes and meanings of flesh –

  A meeting of two kings that is going to end the bloody battles;

  One of the two is defeated but I do not know which.

  It seems as if this man is persuading the other

  That even the conqueror does not win;

  Life will not halt or dwell on these concepts: acceptance of defeat, triumph of victory.

  Such a condition is useless, it does not work.

  It does not work for the victor to sit on the vanquished