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WHALESAuthor(s): WAYNE BROWNSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 4 (DECEMBER 1972), pp. 68-69Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653291 .
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68
WHALES
(for George Lamming) I Turning His huge wrist, what spent God, Bent on attrition, let loose these Under the tides' assertions?
Headless Limbless Trunks without names
They surface in our century From underneath the rjiaiden's floated smile
Or hunger down the valleys of a Gulf whose bile Brings only flotsam back To our moated city. . . .
The shark in green, commercial seas Goes over the decanted poles And gunwales of our history Where civil salmon ride at ease And the drowned crew stare from their portholes
But these go down into ancestral darkness.
Where neither gills nor current stalk These stalk, in hellish opera, Their catch-all flap-mouths and pigs' eyes
Narrowed for one instruction.
II
But the God's undone.
Other, steel Leviathans
Contradict the sea's tongue, Its sybaritic cadences for home: And the sky too has been colonised.
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69
Yet, on dark evenings, mesmerised,
Something else rises, to mackerel light Something else makes of its exiled cry Fountains and rainbows!
The liner churns, The aircraft, armoured, groans from its lair For London, Paris, Frankfurt, Rome, Cities of light - their medieval nightmare -
While on the water some great beast Subsides: meanders to comatose In the God's eye, Mute with exhaustion:
Winnows
Turns Its forehead to the dying sun to die.
WAYNE BROWN
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