Omeros

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

what I preferred was not statues but the bird in the statue's hair.

I do not live in you, I bear my house inside me, everywhere until your winters grow more kind by the dancing firelight of mind where knobs of brass do not exist whose doors dissolve in tenderness House that lets in, at last, those fears that are its guests, to sit on chairs feasts on their human faces, and takes pity simply by the hand shows her her room, and feels the hum of wood and brick becoming home.

Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy's shore. Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator; he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys in every odyssey, one on worried water, the other crouched and motionless, without noise. For both, the 'I' is a mast; a desk is a raft for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft carries the other to cities where people speak a different language, or look at him differently, while the sun rises from the other direction with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey is motionless; as the sea moves round an island that appears to be moving, Jove moves round the heart with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand knows it returns to the port from which it must start. Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you, why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you: to circle yourself and your island with this art.

Why couldn't they love the place, same way, together, the way he always loved her, even with his sore? Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather, in sickness and in health, its beauty in being poor? The way the leaves loved her, not like a pink leaflet printed with slogans of black people fighting war?

These are the days when, however simple the future, we do not go towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish woman is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

History was fact, History was a cannon, not a lizard; De Grasse leaving Martinique, and Rodney crouching to act in the right wind. Iounalo, my royal arse! Hewanorra, my hole! Was the greatest battle in naval history, which put the French to rout, fought for a creature with a disposable tail and elbows like a goalie?