My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | 页面 21

By
DEREK
WALCOTT

The Spectre of Empire
I
Down the Conradian docks of the rusted port,
by gnarled sea grapes whose plates are caked with grime,
to a salvo of flame trees from the old English fort,
he waits, the white spectre of another time,
or stands, propping the entrance of some hovel
of rumshop, to slip into the streets
like the bookmark in a nineteenth-century novel,
scuttering from contact as a crab retreats.
He strolls along the waterfront’s old stench
to the balcony shade of a store in Soufrière
for the vantage-point of a municipal bench
in the volcanic furnace of its town square.
I just missed him as he darted the other way
in the bobbing crowd disgorging from the ferry
in Capri, just as he had fled the bay
of equally blue Campeche and rose-walled Cartagena,
his still elusive silence growing more scary
with every shouted question, because so many were
hurled at him, fleeing last century’s crime.
II

20

Walking the drenched ramparts, tugging his hat-brim,
maintaining his distance on the deaf page,
he cannot hear the insults hurled at him,
bracing for the sputtering brine. An image
more than a man. this white-drill figure
is smoke from a candle stick or incense
or a mosquito coil, his fame is bigger
than his empire’s now, its slow-burning conscience.
Smoke is the guilt of fire, so where he strolls
in Soufrière, in Sumatra, by any clogged basin
where hulks have foundered and garbage-smoke scrolls
its flag, he travels with its sin,
its collapsed mines, its fortunes sieved through bets.
He crosses a cricket field, overrun with stubble
launching a fleet of white, immaculate egrets.