Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  and sucking faces that argued Necessity

  in rapid zeroes which no one else understood

  for the island’s profit. One had rented the sea

  to offshore trawlers, whose nets, if hoisted, would show

  for thrice the length of its coast, while another thief

  turned his black head like a ball in a casino

  when the roulette wheel slowed down like his clicking teeth

  in the pool’s sluggish circle. It screamed in contempt

  that choked in its bile at black people’s laziness

  whenever it leapt from the lava and then went

  under again, then the shooting steam shot its price

  from a fissure, as they went on making their deals

  for the archipelago with hot, melting hands

  before the price of their people dropped. The sandals

  led me along the right path, around the fierce sands,

  round the circle of speculation, where others

  kept making room for slaves to betray their brothers,

  till the eyes in the stone head were cursing their tears.

  II

  Just as the nightingales had forgotten his lines,

  cameras, not chimeras, saw his purple sea

  as a postcard archipelago with gnarled pines

  and godless temples, where the end of poetry

  was a goat bleating down from the theatre steps

  while the myrtles rustled like the dry sails of ships.

  “You ain’t been nowhere,” Seven Seas said, “you have seen

  nothing no matter how far you may have travelled,

  cities with shadowy spires stitched on a screen

  which the beak of a swift has ravelled and unravelled;

  you have learnt no more than if you stood on that beach

  watching the unthreading foam you watched as a youth,

  except your skill with one oar; you hear the salt speech

  that your father once heard; one island, and one truth.

  Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy’s shore.

  Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator;

  he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys

  in every odyssey, one on worried water,

  the other crouched and motionless, without noise.

  For both, the ‘I’ is a mast; a desk is a raft

  for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak

  of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft

  carries the other to cities where people speak

  a different language, or look at him differently,

  while the sun rises from the other direction

  with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey

  is motionless; as the sea moves round an island

  that appears to be moving, love moves round the heart—

  with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand

  knows it returns to the port from which it must start.

  Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you,

  why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you:

  to circle yourself and your island with this art.”

  Helmets of mud-caked skulls. Out of the spectres

  that the forge of the Malebolge was bubbling with,

  a doubled shape stood up. Its grin was like Hector’s.

  Hector in hell, shouldering the lance of an oar!

  In this place he had put himself in full belief

  of an afterlife; a shadow in the geyser

  that arched like a comet with its fountaining steam,

  since for me not to have seen him there would question

  a doctrine with more conviction than my own dream.

  His charred face seemed to be travelling to the sun,

  when its light broke through the changeable smoke once more,

  since hell was certain to him as much as heaven;

  now he was helmeted, and the borrowed visor

  had slitted his face like an iguana’s pods,

  his shield a spiked hubcap, for the road-warrior

  had paused in the smoke, not for Omeros’s gods

  nor the masks of his origins, the god-river,

  the god-snake, but for the One that gathered his race

  in the shoal of a net, a confirmed believer

  in his own hell, that his spectre’s punishment was

  a halt in its passage towards a smokeless place.

  There were Bennett & Ward! The two young Englishmen

  in dirty pith-helmets crouched by the yellow sand

  dribbling from the volcano’s crust. Both were condemned

  to pass a thermometer like that ampersand

  which connected their names on a blackboard, its sign

  coiled like a constrictor round the tree of Eden.

  III

  The stone heels guided me. I followed close behind

  through the veils of stinking sulphur, filthy and frayed,

  till I was as blind as it was, steering with one hand

  in front of my face, beating webs from my forehead,

  through the fool’s gold of the yellow rocks, the thin sand

  running from their fissures. But in such things, the guide

  needs the trust of the wounded one to begin with;

  he could feel my doubt behind him. That was no good.

  I had lost faith both in religion and in myth.

  In one pit were the poets. Selfish phantoms with eyes

  who wrote with them only, saw only surfaces

  in nature and men, and smiled at their similes,

  condemned in their pit to weep at their own pages.

  And that was where I had come from. Pride in my craft.

  Elevating myself. I slid, and kept falling

  towards the shit they stewed in; all the poets laughed,

  jeering with dripping fingers; then Omeros gripped

  my hand in enclosing marble and his strength moved

  me away from that crowd, or else I might have slipped

  to that backbiting circle, mockers and self-loved.

  The blind feet guided me higher as the crust sloped.

  As I, contemptuously, turned my head away,

  a fist of ice gripped it from the soul-shaping forge,

  and it wrenched my own head bubbling its half-lies,

  crying out its name, but each noun stuck in its gorge

  as it begged for pardon, willing to surrender

  if another chance were given it at language.

  But the ice-matted head hissed,

  “You tried to render

  their lives as you could, but that is never enough;

  now in the sulphur’s stench ask yourself this question,

  whether a love of poverty helped you

  to use other eyes, like those of that sightless stone?”

  My own head sank in the black mud of Soufrière,

  while it looked back with all the faith it could summon.

  Both heads were turned like the god of the yawning year

  on whose ridge I stood looking back where I came from.

  The nightmare was gone. The bust became its own past,

  I could still hear its white lines in the far-off foam.

  I woke to hear blackbirds bickering at breakfast.

  Chapter LIX

  I

  My light was clear. It defined the fallen schism

  of a starfish, its asterisk printed on sand,

  its homage to Omeros my exorcism.

  I was an ant on the forehead of an atlas,

  the stroke of one spidery palm on a cloud’s page,

  an asterisk only. Achille with his cutlass

  rattling into the hold shared the same privilege

  of an archipelago’s dawn, a fresh language

  salty and shared by the bittern’s caw, by a frieze

  of low pelicans. The sea was my privilege.

  And a f
resh people. The roar of famous cities

  entered the sea-almond’s branches and then tightened

  into silence, and my crab’s hand came out to write—

  and down the January beach as it brightened

  came bent sibyls sweeping the sand, then a hermit

  waist-high in the empty bay, still splashing his face

  in that immeasurable emptiness whose war

  was between the clouds only. In that blessèd space

  it was so quiet that I could hear the splutter

  Philoctete made with his ablutions, and that deep “Ah!”

  for the New Year’s benediction. Then Philoctete

  waved “Morning” to me from far, and I waved back;

  we shared the one wound, the same cure. I felt the wet

  sand under my soles, and the beach close like a book

  behind me with every footmark. The morning’s gift

  was enough, but holier than that was the crab’s lift-

  ed pincer with its pen like the sea-dipping swift.

  All the thunderous myths of that ocean were blown

  up with the spray that dragged from the lacy bulwarks

  of Cap’s bracing headland. The sea had never known

  any of them, nor had the illiterate rocks,

  nor the circling frigates, nor even the white mesh

  that knitted the Golden Fleece. The ocean had

  no memory of the wanderings of Gilgamesh,

  or whose sword severed whose head in the Iliad.

  It was an epic where every line was erased

  yet freshly written in sheets of exploding surf

  in that blind violence with which one crest replaced

  another with a trench and that heart-heaving sough

  begun in Guinea to fountain exhaustion here,

  however one read it, not as our defeat or

  our victory; it drenched every survivor

  with blessing. It never altered its metre

  to suit the age, a wide page without metaphors.

  Our last resort as much as yours, Omeros.

  II

  Why waste lines on Achille, a shade on the sea-floor?

  Because strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture

  is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor,

  deeper than it seems on the surface; slowly but sure,

  it will change us with the fluent sculpture of Time,

  it will grip like the polyp, soldered by the slime

  of the sea-slug. Below him, a parodic architecture

  re-erected the earth’s crusted columns, its porous

  temples, stoas through which whipping eels slide,

  over him the tasselled palanquins of Portuguese man-o’-wars

  bobbed like Asian potentates, when ribbed dunes hide

  the spiked minarets, and the waving banners of moss

  are the ghosts of motionless hordes. The crabs’ anabasis

  scuttles under his wake, because this is the true element,

  water, which commemorates nothing in its stasis.

  From that coral and crystalline origin, a simply decent

  race broke from its various pasts, from howling sand

  to a track in a forest, torn from the farthest places

  of their nameless world. With nothing more in his hand

  than the lance of a spear-gun, fishes keep shifting

  direction like schools of philosophers,

  and cautious plankton, who wait till darkness is lifting

  from the Antillean seabed, burst into phosphorus,

  meadows of stuttering praise. History has simplified

  him. Its elegies had blinded me with the temporal

  lament for a smoky Troy, but where coral died

  it feeds on its death, the bones branch into more coral,

  and contradiction begins. It lies in the schism

  of the starfish reversing heaven; the mirror of History

  has melted and, beneath it, a patient, hybrid organism

  grows in his cruciform shadow. For a city

  it had coral parthenons. No needling steeple

  magnetized pilgrims, but it grew a good people.

  God’s light ripples over them as it does the Troumasse

  River in the morning, as it does over me, when

  the palm-wheel threshes its spokes, and my ecstasy

  of privilege lifts me with the man-o’-war’s wing

  in that fear of happiness I have never shed,

  pierced by a lance of sunlight flung over the sea.

  O Sun, the one eye of heaven, O Force, O Light,

  my heart kneels to you, my shadow has never changed

  since the salt-fresh mornings of encircling delight

  across whose cities the wings of the frigate ranged

  freer than any republic, gliding with ancient

  ease! I praise you not for my eyes. That other sight.

  III

  By the bay’s cobalt, to that inaudible thud

  that hits the forehead with its stunning width and hue,

  the rage of Achille at being misunderstood

  by a camera for the spelling on his canoe

  was the same process by which men are simplified

  as if they were horses, muscles made beautiful

  by working the sea; by the deep clefts that divide

  the plates of their chests, the iron wrists that can pull

  a dead log up the wash alone, or, when the trench

  of a breaker crests, how their soles turn into rocks,

  though they are blurred for a while in the bursting drench

  shifting a little for purchase. So an anchor

  had hooked its rust in one sufferer, and the scar shows

  on the slit bone still; so work was the prayer of anger

  for a cursing Achille, who refused to strike a pose

  for crouching photographers. So, if at the day’s end

  when they hauled with aching tendons the logged net,

  their palms stinging dry with salt cuts from the stubborn seine,

  the tourists came flying to them to capture the scene

  like gulls fighting over a catch, Achille would howl

  at their clacking cameras, and hurl an imagined lance!

  It was the scream of a warrior losing his only soul

  to the click of a Cyclops, the eye of its globing lens,

  till they scuttered from his anger as a khaki mongrel

  does from a kick. It was the last form of self-defence,

  it was the scream of gangrene, and the vine round his heel

  with its thorns. Waiters in bow-ties on the terrace

  laughed at his anger. They too had been simplified.

  They were like Lawrence crossing the sand with his trays.

  They laughed at simplicities, the laugh of a wounded race.

  Chapter LX

  I

  He had never seen such strange weather; the surprise

  of a tempestuous January that churned

  the foreshore brown with remarkable, bursting seas

  convinced him that “somewhere people interfering

  with the course of nature”; the feathery mare’s tails

  were more threateningly frequent, and its sunsets

  the roaring ovens of the hurricane season,

  while the frigates hung closer inland and the nets

  starved on their bamboo poles. The rain lost its reason

  and behaved with no sense at all. What had angered

  the rain and made the sea foam? Seven Seas would talk

  bewilderingly that man was an endangered

  species now, a spectre, just like the Aruac

  or the egret, or parrots screaming in terror

  when men approached, and that once men were satisfied

  with destroying men they would move on to Nature.

  And those were the omens. He must not be afraid

  once he kept his
respect; the scarves of the sibyl

  were those mare’s tails over the island. Their changing

  was beyond his strength and he was responsible

  only to himself. The wisdom was enraging.

  In fury, he sailed south, away from the trawlers

  who were dredging the banks the way others had mined

  the archipelago for silver. New silver was

  the catch threshing the cavernous hold till each mound

  was a pyramid; banks robbed by thirty-mile seines,

  their refrigerated scales packed tightly as coins,

  and no more lobsters on the seabed. All the signs

  of a hidden devastation under the cones

  of volcanic gorges. Every dawn made his trade

  difficult and empty, sending him farther out

  than he wanted to go, until he felt betrayed

  by his calling, by a greed that had never banned

  the voracious, insatiable nets. Fathoms where

  he had seen the marlin buckle and leap were sand

  clean at the bottom; the steely blue albacore

  no longer leapt to his line, questioning dolphins,

  yes, but the shrimp were finished, their bodies were curled

  like exhausted Caribs in the deep silver mines;

  was he the only fisherman left in the world

  using the old ways, who believed his work was prayer,

  who caught only enough, since the sea had to live,

  because it was life? So he sailed down to Soufrière

  along and close to the coast. He might have to leave

  the village for good, its hotels and marinas,

  the ice-packed shrimps of pink tourists, and find someplace,

  some cove he could settle like another Aeneas,

  founding not Rome but home, to survive in its peace,

  far from the discos, the transports, the greed, the noise.

  So he and Philoctete loaded the canoe and went

  searching down the coastline, Anse La Raye, Canaries,

  past cliffs pinned with birds, past beaches still innocent

  where he saw a small boy alone, riding a log

  and fishing with a twine, and the memory sent

  a spear into his chest; he waved from the pirogue

  but the small boy ignored him, just as Achille had

  other boats long ago. Lean, supple, stark-naked.

  But he found no cove he liked as much as his own

  village, whatever the future brought, no inlet

  spoke to him quietly, no bay parted its mouth

  like Helen under him, so he told Philoctete

  that until they found it they would keep going south,