Laudator Temporis Acti

Derek Walcott, Omeros, chapter I, lines 46-104, in his Selected Poems, ed. Edward Baugh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), pp. 214-216 (line numbers added; a gommier is a tree, Dacryodes excelsa):

These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before.
The first god was a gommier. The generator

began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackerel over water      50
into trembling weeds. Now they cut off the saw,

still hot and shaking, to examine the wound it
had made. They scraped off its gangrenous moss, then ripped
the wound clear of the net of vines that still bound it

to this earth, and nodded. The generator whipped      55
back to its work, and the chips flew much faster as
the shark's teeth gnawed evenly. They covered their eyes

from the splintering nest. Now, over the pastures
of bananas, the island lifted its horns. Sunrise
trickled down its valleys, blood splashed on the cedars,      60

and the grove flooded with the light of sacrifice.
A gommier was cracking. Its leaves an enormous
tarpaulin with the ridgepole gone. The creaking sound

made the fishermen leap back as the angling mast      65
leant slowly towards the troughs of ferns; then the ground
shuddered under the feet in waves, then the waves passed.

II

Achille looked up at the hole the laurel had left.
He saw the hole silently healing with the foam
of a cloud like a breaker. Then he saw the swift      70

crossing the cloud-surf, a small thing, far from its home,
confused by the waves of blue hills. A thorn vine gripped
his heel. He tugged it free. Around him, other ships

were shaping from the saw. With his cutlass he made
a swift sign of the cross, his thumb touching his lips      75
while the height rang with axes. He swayed back the blade,

and hacked the limbs from the dead god, knot after knot,
wrenching the severed veins from the trunk as he prayed:
"Tree! You can be a canoe! Or else you cannot!"

The bearded elders endured the decimation      80
of their tribe without uttering a syllable
of that language they had uttered as one nation,

the speech taught their saplings: from the towering babble
of the cedar to green vowels of bois-campêche.
The bois-flot held it tongue with the laurier-cannelle,       85

the red-skinned logwood endured the thorns in its flesh,
while the Aruacs' patois crackled in the smell
of a resinous bonfire that turned the leaves brown

with curling tongues, then ash, and their language was lost.
Like barbarians striding columns they have brought down,      90
the fishermen shouted. The gods were down at last.

Like pygmies they hacked the trunks of wrinkled giants
for paddles and oars. They were working with the same
concentration as an army of fire-ants.

But vexed by the smoke for defaming their forest,      95
blow-darts of mosquitoes kept needling Achille's trunk.
He frotted white rum on both forearms that, at least,

those that he flattened to asterisks would die drunk.
They went for his eyes. They circled them with attacks
that made him weep blindly. Then the host retreated      100

to high bamboo like the archers of Aruacs
running from the muskets of cracking logs, routed
by the fire's banner and the remorseless axe

hacking the branches.

According to the Encyclopedia of Life, the gommier can grow as high as 115 feet and reach a diameter at breast height of almost 6 feet; the oldest trees may be as much as 400 years old.

---

When I attempted yesterday to find more information about the gommier in Russell M. Burns and Barbara H. Honkala, edd., Silvics of North America, Vol. 2 (Washington: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, 1990), I was prevented by the government shutdown (http://www.na.fs.fed.us/spfo/pubs/silvics_manual/table_of_contents.htm redirected to http://www.usda.gov/fundinglapse.htm).

Hat tip: Eric Thomson.

Labels: arboricide