Saint Lucia poet Derek Walcott

The ocean is history

Derek Walcott

Where are your monuments, your battles, your martyrs?

Where is your tribal memory, gentlemen?

In that grey dome. The sea

Lock them all up. The sea is history.

First, rising oil prices

Nothingness, heavy as chaos,

Then, like a light at the end of the tunnel,

The lantern of a lonely sailboat,

This is Genesis.

Then there was a shout from the crowd,

Shit, groan;

Exodus

Coral welds bone to bone

On the sloping seabed

A blessing in the shadow of a shark,

That was the Ark of the Covenant.

Then by toggling the wire

Undersea Sunshine

The Lamentable Harp of Babylonian Slavery

Like white shells clustered together on handcuffs

Women who drowned,

Those are ivory bracelets

Song of Solomon,

The sea continues to turn the blank pages

Because this is not history.

Then there are those with heavy eyes

Sunken No Grave

The robbers who roasted the cattle,

Leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,

Then there’s the frothy, raging stomach

The tide swallows up Port Royal,

That was Jonah.

Where is your revival?

Sir, it is locked in the sand

Beyond the rocky ledge,

where the battleship floats;

Put on your goggles and I’ll take you there myself.

Everything is subtle and profound,

Walking through the coral colonnade

Through the Gothic windows of the sea fan,

To there,

Blinking, covered in jewels like a queen,

These barnacle-covered ribs

As bumpy as a rock,

It’s a cathedral.

The melting pot before the hurricane

And the bones crushed by the windmill

Into marl and cornmeal,

This is the Lament

That’s just a lament.

This is not history;

Then, like scum on a dry river bank

Brown reeds in the village

Covered and condensed into towns,

At night, the mosquitoes sing

And the spires above them

Piercing the Side of God

Bleeding till sunset, that’s the New Testament.

The white sisters applauded

Like a wave advancing,

This is liberation—

Cheers, cheers—

Disappearing quickly

When the sea dries up in the sun,

But that’s not history.

That’s just faith.

Then each rock split into its own country,

Then there was the fly convention,

Then there is Secretary Heron,

Then the bullfrogs began to roar, demanding a vote,

Firefly has a good idea

A bat-like jet ambassador

Praying mantis, like a khaki policeman,

and the judge’s caterpillar

Check each page carefully.

Then in the dark ears of the ferns

In the salty laughter of the rocks

There are seawater pools and sounds

Like a rumor with no response

The true beginning of history.