The Star-Apple Kingdom
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such subjects as
“Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye.”
The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel
sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees,
and all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules
on the treadmill of Monday to Monday, would repeat
in tongues of water and wind and fire, in tongues
of Mission School pickaninnies, like rivers remembering
their source, Parish Trelawny, Parish St. David, Parish
St. Andrew, the names afflicting the pastures,
the lime groves and fences of marl stone and the cattle
with a docile longing, an epochal content.
And there were, like old wedding lace in an attic,
among the boas and parasols and the tea-coloured
daguerreotypes, hints of an epochal happiness
as ordered and infinite to the child
as the great house road to the Great House
down a perspective of casuarinas plunging green manes
in time to the horses, an orderly life
reduced by lorgnettes day and night, one disc the sun,
the other the moon, reduced into a pier glass:
nannies diminished to dolls, mahogany stairways
no larger than those of an album in which
the flash of cutlery yellows, as gamboge as
the piled cakes of teatime on that latticed
bougainvillea verandah that looked down toward
a prospect of Cuyp-like Herefords under a sky
lurid as a porcelain souvenir with these words:
“Herefords at Sunset in the Valley of the Wye.”
Strange, that the rancour of hatred hid in that dream
of slow dreams and lily-like parasols, in snaps
of fine old colonial families, curled at the edge
not from age or from fire or the chemicals, no, not at all,
but because, off at its edges, innocently excluded
stood the groom, the cattle boy, the housemaid, the gardeners,
the tenants, the good Negroes down in the village,
their mouths in the locked jaw of a silent scream.
A scream which would open the doors to swing wildly
all night, that was bringing in heavier clouds,
more black smoke than cloud, frightening the cattle
in whose bulging eyes the Great House diminished;
a scorching wind of a scream
that began to extinguish the fireflies,
that dried the water mill creaking to a stop
as it was about to pronounce Parish Trelawny
all over, in the ancient pastoral voice,
a wind that blew all without bending anything,
neither the leaves of all the album nor the lime groves;
blew Nanny floating back in white from a feather
to a chimerical, chemical pin speck that shrank
the drinking Herefords to brown porcelain cows
on a mantel piece, Trelawny trembling with dusk,
the scorched pastures of the old benign Custos; blew
for the decent servants and the lifelong cook,
and shriveled to a shard that ancient pastoral
of dusk in a gilt-edged frame now catching the evening sun
in Jamaica, making both epochs one.
He looked out from the Great House windows on
clouds that still held the fragrances of fire,
he saw the Botanical Gardens officially drown
in a formal dusk, where governors had strolled
and black gardeners had smiled over glinting shears
at the lilies of parasols on the floating lawns,
the flame trees obeyed his will and lowered their wicks,
the flowers tightened their fists in the name of thrift,
the porcelain lamps of ripe cocoa, the magnolia’s jet
dimmed on the one circuit with the ginger lilies
and left a lonely bulb on the verandah,
and, had his mandate extended to that ceiling
of star-apple candelabra, he would have ordered
the sky to sleep, saying, I’m tired,
save the starlight for victories, we can’t afford it,
leave the moon on for one more hour, and that’s it.
But though his power, the given mandate, extended
from tangerine daybreaks to star-apple dusks,
his hand could not dam that ceaseless torrent of dust
that carried the shacks of the poor, to their root-rock music,
down the gullies of Yallahs and August Town,
to lodge them on thorns of maca, with their rags
crucified by cactus, tins, old tires, cartons;
from the black Warieka Hills the sky glowered fierce as
the dials of a million radios,
a throbbing sunset that glowed like a grid
where the dread beat rose from the jukebox of Kingston.
He saw the fountains dried of quadrilles, the water-music
of the country dancers, the fiddlers like fifes
put aside. He had to heal
this malarial island in its bath of bay leaves,
its forests tossing with fever, the dry cattle
groaning like winches, the grass that kept shaking
its head to remember its name. No vowels left
in the mill wheel, the river. Rock stone. Rock stone.
The mountains rolled like whales through phosphorous stars
as he swayed like a stone down fathoms into sleep,
drawn by that magnet which pulls down half the world
between a star and a star, by that black power
that has the assassin dreaming of snow,
that poleaxes the tyrant to a sleeping child.
The house is rocking at anchor, but as he falls
his mind is a mill wheel in moonlight,
and he hears, in the sleep of his moonlight, the drowned
bell of Port Royal's cathedral, sees the copper pennies
of bubbles rising from the empty eye-pockets
of green buccaneers, the parrot fish floating
from the frayed shoulders of pirates, sea-horses
drawing gowned ladies in their liquid promenade
across the moss-green meadows of the sea;
he heard the drowned choirs under Palisadoes,
a hymn ascending to earth from a heaven inverted
by water, a crab climbing the steeple,
and he climbed from that submarine kingdom
as the evening lights came on in the institute,
the scholars lamplit in their own aquarium,
he saw them mouthing like parrot fish, as he passed
upward from that baptism, their history lessons,
the bubbles like ideas which he could not break:
Jamaica was captured by Penn and Venables,
Port Royal perished in a cataclysmic earthquake.
Before the coruscating façades of cathedrals
from Santiago to Caracas, where the penitential archbishops
washed the feet of paupers (a parenthetical moment
that made the Caribbean a baptismal font,
turned butterflies to stone, and whitened like doves
the buzzards circling municipal garbage),
the Caribbean was borne like an elliptical basin
in the hands of acolytes, and a people were absolved
of a history which they did not commit;
the slave pardoned his whip, and the dispossessed
said the rosary of islands for three hundred years,
a hymn that resounded like the hum of the sea
inside a sea-cave, as their knees turned to stone,
while the bodies of patriots were melting down walls
still crusted with mute outcries of La Revolución!
“San Salvador, pray for us, St. Thomas, San Domingo,
ora pro nobis, intercede for us, Sancta Lucia
of no eyes,” and when the circular chaplet
reached the last black bead of Sancta Trinidad
they began again, their knees drilled into stone,
where Colón had begun, with San Salvador’s bead,
beads of black colonies round the necks of Indians.
And while they prayed for an economic miracle,
ulcers formed on the municipal portraits,
the hotels went up, and the casinos and brothels,
and the empires of tobacco, sugar, and bananas,
until a black woman, shawled like a buzzard,
climbed up the stairs and knocked at the door
of his dream, whispering in the ear of the keyhole:
"Let me in, I'm finished with praying, I'm the Revolution.
I am the darker, the older America."
She was as beautiful as a stone in the sunrise,
her voice had the gutturals of machine guns
across khaki deserts where the cactus flower
detonates like grenades, her sex was the slit throat
of an Indian, her hair had the blue-black sheen of the crow.
She was a black umbrella blown inside out
by the wind of revolution, La Madre Dolorosa,
a black rose of sorrow, a black mine of silence,
raped wife, empty mother, Aztec virgin
transfixed by arrows from a thousand guitars,
a stone full of silence, which, if it gave tongue
to the tortures done in the name of the Father,
would curdle the blood of the marauding wolf,
the fountain of generals, poets, and cripples
who danced without moving over their graves
with each revolution; her Caesarean was stitched
by the teeth of machine guns, and every sunset
she carried the Caribbean's elliptical basin
as she had once carried the penitential napkins
to be the footbath of dictators, Trujillo, Machado,
and those whose faces had yellowed like posters,
on municipal walls. Now she stroked his hair
until it turned white, but she would not understand
that he wanted no other power but peace
that he wanted a revolution without any bloodshed,
he wanted a history without any memory,
streets without statues,
and a geography without myth. He wanted no armies
but those regiments of bananas, thick lances of cane,
and he sobbed, "I am powerless, except for love.”
She faded from him, because he could not kill;
she shrank to a bat that hung day and night
in the back of his brain. He rose in his dream.
The soul, which was his body made as thin
as its reflection and invulnerable
without its clock, was losing track of time;
it walked the mountain tracks of the Maroons,
it swung with Gordon from the creaking gibbet,
it bought a pack of peppermints and cashews
from one of the bandanna’d mammies outside the ward,
it heard breath pitched to the decibels
of the peanut vendors' carts, it entered a municipal wall
Stirring the slogans that shrieked his name: saviour!
and others: lackey! he melted like a spoon
through the alphabet soup of CIA, PNP, OPEC,
that resettled once he passed through with this thought:
I should have foreseen those seraphs with barbed-wire hair,
beards like burst mattresses, and wild eyes of garnet,
who nestled the Coptic Bible to their ribs, would
call me Joshua, expecting him to bring down Babylon
by Wednesday, after the fall of Jericho; yes, yes,
I should have seen the cunning bitterness of the rich
who left me no money but these mandates:
His aerial mandate, which
contained the crows whose circuit
was this wedding band that married him to his island.
His marine mandate, which
was the fishing limits
which the shark scissored like silk with its teeth
between Key West and Havana;
his terrestrial:
the bled hills rusted with bauxite;
paradisal:
the chimneys like angels sheathed in aluminium.
In shape like a cloud
he saw the face of his father,
the hair like white cirrus blown back
in a photographic wind,
the mouth of mahogany winced shut,
the eyes lidded, resigned
to the first compromise,
the last ultimatum,
the first and last referendum.
One morning the Caribbean was cut up
by seven prime ministers who bought the sea in bolts—
one thousand miles of aquamarine with lace trimmings;
one million yards of lime-coloured silk,
one mile of violet, leagues of cerulean satin—
who sold it at a markup to the conglomerates,
the same conglomerates who had rented the water spouts
for ninety-nine years in exchange for fifty ships,
who retailed it in turn to the ministers
with only one bank account, who then resold it
in ads for the Caribbean Economic Community,
till everyone owned a little piece of the sea,
from which some made saris, some made bandannas;
the rest was offered on trays to white cruise ships
taller than the post office; then the dogfights
began in the cabinets as to who had first sold
the archipelago for this chain store of islands.
Now a tree of grenades was his star-apple kingdom,
over fallow pastures his crows patrolled,
he felt his fist involuntarily tighten
into a talon that was strangling five doves,
the mountains loomed leaden under martial law,
the suburban gardens flowered with white paranoia
next to the bougainvilleas of astonishing April;
the rumours were a rain that would not fall:
that enemy intelligence had alerted the roaches'
quivering antennae, that bats flew like couriers,
transmitting secrets between the embassies;
over dials in the war rooms, the agents waited
for a rifle crack from Havana; down shuttered avenues
roared a phalanx of Yamahas. They left
a hole in the sky that closed on silence.
He didn’t hear the roar of the motorcycles
diminish in circles like those of the water mill
in a far childhood; he was drowned in sleep;
he slept, without dreaming, the sleep after love
in the mineral oblivion of night
whose flesh smells of cocoa, whose teeth are white
as coconut meat, whose breath smells of ginger,
whose braids are scented like sweet-potato vines
in furrows still pungent with the sun.
He slept the sleep that wipes out history,
he slept like the islands on the breast of the sea,
like a child again in her star-apple kingdom.
Tomorrow the sea would gleam like nails
under a zinc sky where the barren frangipani
was hammered, a horizon without liners;
tomorrow the heavy caravels of clouds would wreck
and dissolve in their own foam on the reefs
of the mountains, tomorrow a donkey's yawn
would saw the sky in half, and at dawn
would come the noise of a government groaning uphill.
But now she held him, as she holds us all,
her history-orphaned islands, she to whom
we came late as our muse, our mother,
who suckled the islands, who, when she grows old
with her breasts wrinkled like eggplants,
is the head-tie mother, the bleached-sheets-on-the-river-rocks
mother,
the gospel mother, the t'ank-you-parson mother
who turns into mahogany, the lignum-vitae mother,
her sons like thorns,
her daughters dry gullies that give birth to stones,
who was, in our childhood, the housemaid and the cook,
the young grand' who polished the plaster figure
of Clio, Muse of history, in her seashell grotto
in the Great House parlour, Anadyomene washed
in the deep Atlantic heave of her housemaid's hymn.
In the indigo dawn the palms unclenched their fists,
his eyes opened the flowers, and he lay as still
as the waterless mill wheel. The sun's fuse caught;
it hissed on the edge of the skyline, and day exploded
its remorseless avalanche of dray carts and curses,
the roaring oven of Kingston, its sky as fierce
as the tin box of a patties cart. Down the docks
between the Levantine smells of the warehouses
nosed the sea-wind with its odour of a dog's damp fur.
He lathered in anger and refreshed his love.
He was lathered like a horse, but the instant
the shower crowned him and he closed his eyes,
he was a bride under lace, remarrying his country,
a child drawn by the roars of the mill wheel’s electorate,
those vows reaffirmed; he dressed, went down to breakfast,
and sitting again at the mahogany surface
of the breakfast table, its dark hide as polished
as the sheen of mares, saw his father's face
and his own face blent there, and looked out
to the drying garden and its seeping pond.
What was the Caribbean? A green pond mantling
behind the Great House columns of Whitehall,
behind the Greek façades of Washington,
with bloated frogs squatting on lily pads
like islands, islands that coupled as sadly as turtles
engendering islets, as the turtle of Cuba
mounting Jamaica engendered the Caymans, as, behind
the hammerhead turtle of Haiti-San Domingo
trailed the little turtles from Tortuga to Tobago;
he followed the bobbing trek of the turtles
leaving America for the open Atlantic,
felt his own flesh loaded like the pregnant beaches
with their moon-guarded eggs—they yearned for Africa,
they were lemmings drawn by magnetic memory
to an older death, to broader beaches
where the coughing of lions was dumbed by breakers.
Yes, he could understand their natural direction
but they would drown, sea-eagles circling them,
and the languor of frigates that do not beat wings,
and he closed his eyes, and felt his jaw drop
again with the weight of that silent scream.
He cried out at the turtles as one screams at children
with the anger of love, it was the same scream
which, in his childhood, had reversed an epoch
that had bent back the leaves of his star-apple kingdom,
made streams race uphill, pulled the water wheel backward
like the wheels in a film, and at that outcry,
from the raw ropes and tendons of his throat,
the sea-buzzards receded and receded into specks,
and the osprey vanished.
On the knee-hollowed steps
of the crusted cathedral, there was a woman in black,
the black of moonless nights, within whose eyes
shone seas in starlight like the glint of knives
(the one who had whispered to the keyhole of his ear),
washing the steps, and she heard it first.
She was one of a flowing black river of women
who bore elliptical basins to the feet of pauper
on the Day of Thorns, who bore milk pails to cows
in a pastoral sunrise, who bore baskets on their heads
down the haemophilic red hills of Haiti,
now with the squeezed rag dripping from her hard hands
the way that vinegar once dropped from a sponge,
but she heard as a dog hears, as all the underdogs
of the world hear, the pitched shriek of silence.
Star-apples rained to the ground in that silence,
the silence was the green of cities undersea,
and the silence lasted for half an hour
in that single second, a seashell silence, resounding
with silence, and the men with barbed-wire beards saw
in that creak of light that was made between
the noises of the world that was equally divided
between rich and poor, between North and South,
between white and black, between two Americas,
he fields of silent Zion in Parish Trelawny,
in Parish St. David, in Parish St. Andrew,
leaves dancing like children without any sound,
in the valley of Tryall, and the white, silent roar
of the old water wheel in the star-apple kingdom;
and the woman’s face, had a smile been decipherable
in that map of parchment so rivered with wrinkles,
would have worn the same smile with which he now
cracked the day open and began his egg.
Copyright Credit: Derek Walcott, "The Star-Apple Kingdom" from Poems: 1965-1980. Copyright © 1992 by Derek Walcott. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
Source: Poems: 1965-1980 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992)