BRICK

114

The kaachi I heard growing up was neither a bell nor a voice but an electric horn that blared from Tropicana Sugar Estate’s factory. The sound travelled miles. The sound reached into the barracks of Jane Ash Corner, Duckenfield, Cheswick, Hampton Court, Dalvey—all those gently falling Anglo-Saxon district names—out of which bodies rose up at the break of dawn, at midday, at dusk, at bedtime, and at midnight and filed off down the marl-and-ash road to sweat in the satanic vats. Time was shaped by the kaachi’s eternal shift change. What I heard was the sound of a tragic pastoral, the sound of a place blunted into routines of and for survival, routines intimately tied to the sugar-cane crop, the original sin of suffering. Sugar cane. Saccharum officinarum. The sound is a terrifying pathos.

But you cannot hear the shrill hiss of that incessant harpy, the kaachi. It is a sound I would not want you to hear. I want you to hear another sound, one that even as it issues—even as it is uttered—from the pain of the sugar cane, out of the despair of history, manages to bear an elemental cry that imagines itself beyond pain, beyond despair, beyond cane, and beyond history.

Here is that sound:

Half my friends are dead. I will make you new ones, said earth. No, give me them back, as they were, instead, with faults and all, I cried.

Tonight I can snatch their talk from the faint surf ’s drone through the canes, but I cannot walk on the moonlit leaves of ocean down that white road alone, or float with the dreaming motion of owls leaving earth’s load. O earth, the number of friends you keep exceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff flash green and silver; they were the seraph lances of my faith, but out of what is lost grows something stronger that has the rational radiance of stone, enduring moonlight, further than despair, strong as the wind, that through dividing canes brings those we love before us, as they were, with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

This poem is called “Sea Canes,” and it appears in Derek Walcott’s 1976 volume, Sea Grapes. Five tercet stanzas set between a quatrain and a couplet, alternating full and half rhymes, “Sea Canes” has the skewed formality of a cultivated sugar-cane plot, lost in a dense forest of classical oaks and beech trees. This cultivated structure falls away where the rhythm of the poem commingles into an Antillean melody, and you hear, with pictorial clarity, a landscape that is asymmetrical, self-creating, and involved in the speaker’s lament. A reminder of the dead and the radical site of consolation. How does the poem become such a site? A fair amount of classicism drives the matter.

There’s the ecologic convention; there’s the apostrophe to earth, earth which is allegorized into