Omeros by Derek Walcott Read Free Book Online

day
    and would sleep through it all. After their disasters
    it was he who cleaned up after their goddamned party.
    So he went straight to bed at the first sign of a drizzle.
    Now, like a large coalpot with headlands for its handles,
    the Sea cooks up a storm, raindrops start to sizzle
    like grease, there is a brisk business in candles
    in Ma Kilman’s shop. Candles, nails, a sudden increase in
    the faithful, and a mark-up on matches and bread.
    In the grey vertical forest of the hurricane season,
    when the dirty sea returns the wreaths of the dead,
    all the village could do was listen to the gods in session,
    playing any instruments that came into their craniums,
    the harp-sighing ripple of a hither-and-zithering sea,
    the knucklebone pebbles, the abrupt Shango drums
    made Neptune rock in the caves. Fête start! Erzulie
    rattling her ra-ra; Ogun, the blacksmith, feeling
    No Pain; Damballa winding like a zandoli
    lizard, as their huge feet thudded on the ceiling,
    as the sea-god, drunk, lurched from wall to wall, saying:
    “Mama, this music so loud, I going in seine,”
    then throwing up at his pun. People were praying,
    but then the gods, who were tired, were throwing a fête,
    and their fêtes went on for days, and their music ranged
    from polkas of rain to waves dancing La Comète,
    and the surf clapped hands whenever the patterns changed.
    For the gods aren’t men, they get on well together,
    holding a hurricane-party in their cloud-house,
    and what brings the gods close is the thunderous weather,
    where Ogun can fire one with his partner Zeus.
    Achille in his shack heard chac-chac and violin
    in the telephone wires, a sound like Helen
    moaning, or Seven Seas, blind as a sail in rain.
    In the devastated valleys, crumpling brown water
    at their prows, headlights on, passenger-vans floated
    slowly up roads that were rivers, through the slaughter
    of the year’s banana-crop, past stiff cows bloated
    from engorging mud as the antlers of trees tossed
    past the banks like migrating elk. It was as if
    the rivers, envying the sea, tired of being crossed
    in one leap, had joined in a power so massive
    that it made islands of villages, made bridges
    the sieves of a force that shouldered culverts aside.
    The rain passed, but people looked up to the ridges
    fraying with its return, and the flood, in its pride,
    entered the sea; then Achille could hear the tunnels
    of brown water roaring in the mangroves; its tide
    hid the keels of the canoes, and their wet gunwales
    were high with rainwater that could warp them rotten
    if they were not bailed. The river was satisfied.
    It was a god too. Too much had been forgotten.
    Then, a mouse after a fête, its claws curled like moss,
    nosing the dew as the lighthouse opened its eye,
    the sunlight peeped out, and people surveyed the loss
    that the gods had made under a clearing-up sky.
    Candles shortened and died. The big yellow tractors
    tossed up the salad of trees, in yellow jackets
    men straightened the chairs of dead poles, the contractors
    in white helmets and slickers heard the castanets
    of the waves going up the islands, moving on
    from here to Guadeloupe, the beaded wires were still.
    They saw the mess the gods made in one night alone,
    as Lightning lifted his stilts over the last hill.
    Achille bailed out his canoe under an almond
    that shuddered with rain. There would be brilliant days still,
    till the next storm, and their freshness was wonderful.

Chapter X
    I
    For Plunkett, despair came with this shitty weather,
    from the industrious torrents of mid-July
    till the farm was drubbed to a standstill. This year, the
    rain was an unshifting thicket, the branched sky
    grew downwards like mangroves, or an immense banyan.
    The bulbs dangled weakly from the roof of the pens,
    their cords sticky with flies, till he, like everyone
    else, watched the drifts, hating the separate silence
    that settled his labourers when their work was done.
    He saw that their view of him would always