from The Prodigal: 14

From a blue keg, the barrel's thumb-tuned goatskin,

the choirs of ancestral ululation

are psalms and pivot for the prodigal

in a dirt yard at Piaille, are confrontation,

old incantation and fresh sacrifice

where a ram is tethered, without the scrolled horns,

wool locks and beard of the scapegoat,

in the Old Testament, or black blood gushing in a trench

in Attic ceremony and rite. Death softens the eyes

of the still, unbleating sheep, a common ewe,

as for you this is common. There is no awe

in repetition, no claim, no tribal ecstasy,

no pardon in the bent smoke from Guinea,

the sprinkled white rum, or the meal crumbled

on the small stone altar, in the broken memory

of the slaver's coast and the braided villages

of thatch and coalpot from the salted passage

to this paralysis where your pale feet cannot keep time

feel no communion with its celebrants,

they keep another time, the time you keep

comes with a different metre, your skin

what sheath and prison that it has become

as a dried chrysalis with no ressurection

and one unwished for. Star-embers fade.

I could give facts and dates, but to what use?

In the lush chasms and fissures of Choiseul

an ogre bred my grandam, whelped my father,

erected my tall aunts; slopes with potato vines,

and the narrow, clean dark water of River Doree,

the fragrant hogplums and chapel of La Fargue;

go in search of his own shire, unlatch a gate

that opens into Albion, its faery flowers,

its source of intellectual bastardy,

without embarrassment or degradation,

without belligerence or accusation,

and mostly selfishly, without self-contempt,

a curious and self-nourishing integer

outside their given numbers and their dates,

as nameless as the bush, beyond heredity

or prophecy, or the quiet panic of clocks,

the shallow penitence of mirrors. Mongrel.

And out of this chord, this discord will come

the Atlantic's drone, the Caribbean hum

of chaos in an ochre afternoon

the enclosing harmony that we call home

when the sea mints its quicksilver, when

the cedars sag and the light ends up with nothing.

The facts! The Facts! The history. The cause.

You need a history to make your case.

III

1492. 1833. 1930.

Dates. The one thing about which there is no discourse.

Dates multiplied by events, by consequences,

are what add up to History. We have a few coins

struck for a mere handful of events,

as amateur numismatists, regal profiles,

none worthy in the traditional way of memory

slavery being an infinity of endeavour

without pause or payment, without commemoration,

only the long division of day into dark,

of drought into rainburst, equinoxes glide

over their own shadows, and all our dates,

our calendars, hymns and anniversaries,

were bequeathed to us. Left to itself

the brain would be mantled like coral in the cool

shade of a reefs outcrop and turret, swayed

like reeds in meditation, dateless.

The petals of the sun curl, wilting on its stalk–

here comes the quiet lily crescent of the moon.

From this thick tree issues miraculous bread.

The breadfruit makes itself from copious shade,

whose dial is the ground's dry, palmate leaves,

a voluble, invaluable dome, a library,

where all the town's talk is stored,

and in whose core is coiled—a tempest,

a rising sea in wind, the spinning pages

of remorseful texts, Bligh's log and cannonballs

and bowling thunder, shelter from the rain

and so magnanimous in circumference

that it has no time without shade, and shade

is suffering. The sun makes their suffering mute.

This bedraggled backyard, this unfulfilled lot,

this little field of leaves, brittle and fallen,

of all the cities of the world, this is your centre.

O to be luminous and exact! As this tree is

in ripening sunshine, that your own leaves could shine

with nourishment, and give such shade and peace,

the mirror of each canvas that you sign.

Despite acclamation, despite contempt,

I was never part of that catalogue

in spite of friends in the same business

neither of the free-verse orthodoxy, nor the other—

the clogged, elegiac thickness of memory;

farther away from all that, forever,

knee-high in the foam of the page

wading by sounding caves.

Gradually it hardens, the death-mask of Fame.

And Sancta Trinidad. It is that sacred to me.

However fragmentary, through a sunlit hedge,

by the running of clear water over the sun-wiry stones

and a cool hoarding of bamboos without a bridge

phrases of Spain in summer, in the vale of Santa Cruz,

perhaps because of the name, but the bamboo's fountains

arch, sounding sweet, surreptitious, twittering leaves

and shadows moving over indigo mountains.

In a green street of hedges and vermilion roofs,

and gates that creak open into banana yards

and doors that groan on the evocation of ginger

behind which are the hill with five cresting palms

whose long fingers are stirring tropical almanacs

darkened with rain over the grey savannahs

of zebu and bison and the small chalk temples

of an almost erased Asia, and the ovations of cane

through which turbaned horsemen carry feathering lances.

The cloud-white egret, the heron whose hue

is wet slate, move through a somnolence

as sweet as malaria to a child whose parched lips

are soothed by a servant or his own mother,

to the sudden great sound of rain on the roofs,

cloudburst of benediction, dry seas in his ears.

Copyright Credit: Derek Walcott, "14" from The Prodigal. Copyright © 2004 by Derek Walcott. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

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Source: The Prodigal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)