Ten O'Clock News; Derek Walcott

[Walcott] "A Sea Change": Islands hissing in rain. Light rain and governments falling. Follow through cloud again the Bitterns' lonely calling. Can this be the right place, these islands of the blest? Cheap package tours replaced by politics, rain, unrest. The edge-erasing mist through which the sun was splayed in radiance as grayed the harbour's Amethyst. But a slow summer of change then rain keeps blotting out mountain and mountain range to an indigo cutout as if those scissors could childishly simplify geography. Or is the flood having a second try? With orders to collect all the dark gathering rage of a bruised electorate tired of its billboard image on the hotel-crusted reef from Pigeon

Point to Nassau. The sands, white, gritted teeth. It's yes sir, and no sir. The rain moves like the law, slowly. The bays are like the green fatigues of Cuba. A monochromatic lake whose radical romance is erasing as it spreads all of the sunny answers with shag-haired thunderheads. This is no brief unrest of factions making waves. The sea is pacifist deep down. Its graves are wrinkled, a mirror hit by the astonished cries of Bitterns drag the weight of chains of centuries. [pause] I come up to a break on the beach where a channel of the river is pushed back

by the ancestral quarrel of fresh water with salt. Under it, scalloped sand. Not caring who was at fault I turn and cross inland. A sepia lagoon bobbing with coconuts. Helmets from the platoon of some Marine unit whose channel links those years of boyhood photographs in life or colliers to dim Pacific surf. Sandpipers burst like white notes from a ceremonial band circle, then on wet sand discuss their canceled flight. The beach is hot. The fronds of yellow dwarf palms rust. The clouds are close as friends. The sea has not learned rest, exploding but not in Thank Heaven that a rhetoric all wars must be fought in. I break a brittle stick pointlessly and walk on holding the stick

until it hefts like a weapon. There is nothing to kill. Guadalcanal and Guam, they must now look like this abandoned Navy base camouflaged in gold palm. Divisions, dates, and armor marked here are not enough. The surf, a plaster that smooths a fresh cenotaph. I hurl a stick and brush right hand against left hand. Snipers prowl through the bush of my dry hair. I stand not breathing till they pass and the new world feels sure. Sand, and sand-whitened grass and the jets' signature. [pages turning] "Sea cranes."

Only in a world where they are cranes and horses.