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Related Interests Poetry. Stephen Pommells. SequeTon Enlo. Rohib Adrianto Sangia. Yuliana Ratnasari. Mrittika Ghosh. Emiliano Carilla Gaya. Hamada Abd El-Ati Ali.
Hernan Ariel. Anant Kumar. Judhajit Sarkar. Popular in Culture. Carlos Eduardo Alvarez Santiago. Mladen Krstev. IPsoft IPCenter vs. Rene Buest. Senthooran Srikandaraj. Anne Lee. Neil Ivan Armario. Joshua James Reyes. And I for a woman, for her laces and silks, Maria Concepcion. Ay, ay! Next thing I hear, some Commission of Enquiry was being organized to conduct a big quiz, with himself as chairman investigating himself. Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be, not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish, khaki-pants red nigger like you or me.
I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain; all the silver I had was the coins on the sea. You saw them ministers in The Express, guardians of the poor - one hand at their back, and one set o'police only guarding their house, and the Scotch pouring in through the back door.
As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze, that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth, that I said: "Shabine, this is shit, understand! That bitch was so grand, couldn't get off his high horse and kick me himself.
I have seen things that would make a slave sick in this Trinidad, the Limers' Republic. I couldn't shake the sea noise out of my head, the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion, so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick, name O'Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head; but this Caribbean so choke with the dead that when I would melt in emerald water, whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent, I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans, dead-men's-fingers, and then, the dead men.
I saw that the powdery sand was their bones ground white from Senegal to San Salvador, so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month in the Seamen's Hostel. Fish broth and sermons. When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife, when I saw my worries with that other woman, I wept under water, salt seeking salt, for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh! There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep to float her again.
When we drank, the limey got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion. He said he was getting the bends. Good for him! The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion, the hurt I had done to my wife and children, was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light where I could rest, like the pelicans know, so I got raptures once, and I saw God like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far voice was rumbling, "Shabine, if you leave her, if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star.
The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind. Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor? Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for, and the window I can look from that frames my life? After the white man, the niggers didn't want me when the power swing to their side. The first chain my hands and apologize, "History"; the next said I wasn't black enough for their pride. Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks - a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade, the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs that pass before you finish bawling "Parade!
I met History once, but he ain't recognize me, a parchment Creole, with warts like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab through the holes of shadow cast by the net of a grille balcony ; cream linen, cream hat. I confront him and shout, "Sir, is Shabine! They say I'se your grandson.
You remember Grandma, your black cook, at all? A spit like that worth any number of words. But that's all them bastards have left us: words. I no longer believed in the revolution. I was losing faith in the love of my woman. I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok crystallize in The Twelve. Young men without flags using shirts, their chests waiting for holes.
They kept marching into the mountains, and their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand. They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the streets, and the echo of power at the end of the street. Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate; the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine, on Frederick Street the idlers all marching by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf. In the Aleksandr Blok enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc- olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West- ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef.
The Flight passing Blanchisseuse. Gulls wheel like from a gun again, and foam gone amber that was white, lighthouse and star start making friends, down every beach the long day ends, and there, on that last stretch of sand, on a beach bare of all but light, dark hands start pulling in the seine of the dark sea, deep, deep inland.
We float through a rustling forest of ships with sails dry like paper, behind the glass I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons, and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun, right through their tissue, you traced their bones like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines, the backward-moving current swept them on, and high on their decks I saw great admirals, Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders they gave those Shabines, and that forest of masts sail right through the Flight, and all you could hear was the ghostly sound of waves rustling like grass in a low wind and the hissing weds they trail from the stern; slowly they heaved past from east to west like this round world was some cranked water wheel, every ship pouring like a wooden bucket dredged from the deep; my memory revolve on all sailors before me, then the sun heat the horizon's ring and they was mist.
Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations, our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose, 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. 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. 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. 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 kept 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. Editors' Picks All magazines. Explore Podcasts All podcasts. Difficulty Beginner Intermediate Advanced. Explore Documents. Did you find this document useful? Is this content inappropriate? Report this Document. Description: Derek Walcott - Collected Poems, Flag for inappropriate content. Download now. Derek Walcott - Collected Poems, Related titles.
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