Thanksgiving Is Ruined |
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March 31, 2019
Édouard Glissant's "Pays" (1985) An interpretive Englishing ----------------- Country We groaned from the hold of your ship enough to populate the wind Enough to encompass your highest handrail We spelled through the wind the flock of our cries You who know how to read only the boundary lines where our words stray Dismantled from us to you at whom our blood screams And on this ship's deck you hail out to the very imprints of our feet. Let's sing praises to the sea foam as to the "mermaids" Ghosts from the deep and the limes through which We uproot the stump of the Wide Open and trample onto all things Unique You who know to implant in our waste and blood that which is written Where in the night crack open so many sibylline ripenings. Nothing but tar pushes to the edge of the sweetgrass In this country which strives so hard through seed and salting This sweet and preposterous dialect, of stars Between rocky shoals and the green of the depths That you grieve, knotted linen from which bubbles rise Heavy the lodestones of the Heights and uncut diamonds and what a Word to penetrate you, that's how their south is made We breathe deep of this country which runs dry within us, the country which Throws out its dock lines to the kind of dream where the flow of water makes no noise Let us hail out "As it was in the wind, so shall it be in yesteryear" and it is this cry Artful, of sugar, like in this country's Parable of a Windmill We there grown so faint that at the dawn At whom we gunwale laugh born of gully mud A flotation of a whole other kind We spell out that we arrive far away from you where sails forth The Unique, our deepest malady. Cutlasses Are forged by the workshop's light. Mangrove crabs Face crab-eating grey herons, our thirst goes unshod. The arc of the tale circumscribes refusal From the crackling sands, to those who form ranks in the sea Even those who shun our gaze Toward them we gently smile. We are their good news emissaries We measure in the waves the imprint of their toes We dry them out under the bontia trees Like those who wait patiently in guano and weigh down our daydreams Risen from the sea blood mixed with cannonball rust We crack open the former country in this country's shackles We moor it to this magnolia fruit that pretends to remember We sail back up love's dry riverbed we discover man and woman Wedded by an iron anchor stock with rings distinctly forged. We laugh From knowing not to marry the shell ginger plant and bushy ears of corn When yesterday's earth unbrushes within us rocks and itches that burn ----------------- The original is the first devastating poem in this volume. |
