Omeros by Derek Walcott

islands
    as differently as dead leaves in a subtle wind.
    He bent to the map, rubbing his scalp with his hands.
    III
    Once, after the war, he’d made plans to embark on
    a masochistic odyssey through the Empire,
    to watch it go in the dusk, his “I” a column
    with no roof but a pediment, from Singapore
    to the Seychelles in his old Eighth Army outfit,
    calculating that the enterprise would take him
    years, with most of the journey being done on foot,
    before it was all gone, a secular pilgrim
    to the battles of his boyhood, where they were fought,
    from the first musket-shot that divided Concord,
    cracking its echo to some hill-station of Sind,
    after which they would settle down somewhere, but Maud
    was an adamant Eve: “It’ll eat up your pension.”
    But that was his daydream, his pious pilgrimage.
    And he would have done it, if he had had a son,
    but he was an armchair admiral in old age,
    with cold tea and biscuits, his skin wrinkled like milk,
    a gawky egret she stitched in her sea-green silk.

Chapter XVII
    I
    Now, whenever his mind drifted in detachment
    like catatonic noon on the Caribbean Sea,
    Plunkett recited every billet, regiment,
    of the battle’s numerological poetry;
    he learnt eighty ships of the line, he knew the drift
    of the channel that day, and when the trade wind caught
    the British topsails, and a deep-draught sigh would lift
    his memory clear. At noon, he climbed to the fort
    as his self-imposed Calvary; from it, the cross
    of the man-o’-war bird rose. He heard the thunder
    in the cannonading caves, and checked the pamphlet
    from the museum, ticking off every blunder
    with a winged V, for the errors in either fleet.
    In his flapping shorts he measured every distance
    with a squared, revolving stride in the khaki grass.
    One day, at high noon, he felt under observance
    from very old eyes. He spun the binoculars
    slowly, and saw the lizard, elbows akimbo,
    belling its throat on the hot noon cannon, eyes slit,
    orange dewlap dilating on its pinned shadow.
    He climbed and crouched near the lizard. “Come to claim it?”
    the Major asked. “Every spear of grass on this ground
    is yours. Read the bloody pamphlet. Did they name it
    Iounalo for you?”
                                     The lizard spun around
    to the inane Caribbean. Plunkett also.
    “Iounalo, twit! Where the iguana is found.”
    He brought it for the slit eye to read by the glow
    of the throat’s furious wick.
                                                     “Is that how it’s spelt?”
    The tongue leered. The Major stood, brushed off his khaki
    shorts, and rammed the pamphlet into his leather belt.
    “Iounalo, eh? It’s all folk-malarkey!”
    The grass was as long as his shorts. 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? For this a redoubt
    was built? And his countrymen died? For a lizard
    with an Aruac name? It will be rewritten
    by black pamphleteers, History will be revised,
    and we’ll be its villians, fading from the map
    (he said “villians” for “villains”). And when it’s over
    we’ll be the bastards! Somehow the flaring dewlap
    had enraged him. He slammed the door of the Rover,
    but, driving down the cool aisle of casuarinas
    like poplars, was soothed by the breakwater. In a while
    he was himself again. He was himself or as
    much as was left. Innumerable iguanas
    ran down the vines of his skin, like Helen’s cold smile.
    II
    He kept up research in Ordnance. The crusted wrecks
    cast in the armourer’s foundry, the embossed crown
    of the cannon’s iron asterisk: Georgius Rex,
    or Gorgeous Wrecks, Maud punned. In that innocence
    with which History