Poema

Derek Walcott

The Sea is History
(THE STAR-APPLE KINGDOM)

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that gray vault. The sea. The sea has lockedthem up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis. Then there were the packedcries, the shit, the moaning:

Exodus. Bone soldered by coral to bone, mosaics mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,
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that was the Ark of the Covenant. Then came from the pluckedwires of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage, as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets of the Song ofSolomon, but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History. Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle, leaving their charredribs like palm leaves on the shore, then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, and that was Jonah, but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
2out there past the reef's moiling shelf, where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself. It's all subtle and submarine, through colonnades of coral,past the gothic windows of sea fans to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed, blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

and these groined caves with barnacles pitted like stone are ourcathedrals,

and the furnace before the hurricanes: Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills into marl and cornmeal,

and that was Lamentations that was just Lamentations, it was not History;

then came,like scum on the river's drying lip, the brown reeds of villages mantling and congealing into towns,
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and at evening, the midges' choirs, and above them, the spires lancing the side of God

as...