Homecoming

Homecoming: Anse La Raye
Derek Walcott

Whatever else we learned at school, like solemn Afro-Greeks eager for grades, of Helen and the shades of borrowed ancestors, there are no rites for those who have returned, only, when her looms fade,
drilled in our skulls, the doomsurge-haunted nights, only this well-known passage under the coconuts’ salt-rusted
swords, these rotted leathery sea-grape leaves, the seacrabs’ brittle helmets, and
this barbecue of branches, like the ribs
of sacrificial oxen on scorched sand;
only this fish-gut-reeking beach
whose frigates tack like buzzards overhead, whose spindly, sugar-headed children race pelting up from the shallows
because your clothes, your posture
seem a tourist’s.

They swarm like flies round your heart’s sore. Suffer them to come, entering your needle’s eye, knowing whether they live or die, what others make of life will pass them by like that far silvery freighter threading the horizon like a

toy; for once, like them, you wanted no career but this sheer light, this clear, infinite, boring, paradisal sea, but hoped it would mean something to declare today, I am your poet, yours, all this you knew, but never guessed you’d come to know there are homecomings without home.

You give them nothing.
Their curses melt in air.
The black cliffs scowl, the ocean sucks its teeth, like that dugout canoe a drifting petal fallen in a cup, with nothing but its image, you sway, reflecting nothing.
The freighter’s silvery ghost is gone, the children gone.

Dazed by the sun you trudge back to the village past the white, salty esplanade
under whose palms dead fishermen move their draughts in shade, crossing, eating their islands, and one, with a politician’s
ignorant, sweet smile, nods, as if all fate
swayed in his lifted hand.