Homestead

by Eric Roach

Mount Pleasant, Tobago

(Originally published in 1953)

Seven splendid cedars break the trades

from the thin gables of my house,

seven towers of song when the trades rage

through their full green season foliage.

but weathers veer, the drought returns,

the sun burns emerald to ochre

and thirsty winds strip the boughs bare,

then they are tragic stands of sticks

pitiful in pitiless noons

and wear dusk’s buskin and the moon’s.

 

And north beyond them lie the fields

which one man laboured his life’s days,

one man wearying his bone

shaped them as monuments in stone,

hammered them with iron will

and a rugged earthy courage.

and going, left me heritage.

is labour lovely for a man

that drags him daily into earth

returns no fragrance of him forth?

 

The man is dead but I recall

him in my voluntary verse,

his life was unadorned as bread,

he reckoned weathers in his head

and wore their ages on his face

and felt their keenness to his bone

the sting of sun and whip of rain.

he read day’s event from the dawn

and saw the quality of morning

through the sunset mask of evening.

 

In the fervour of my song

I hold him firm upon the fields

in many homely images.

His ghost’s as tall as the tall trees;

he tramps these tracks his business made

by daily roundabout in boots

tougher and earthier than roots;

and every furrow of the earth

and every shaken grace of grass

knows him the spirit of the place.

 

He was a slave’s son, peasant born,

paisan, paisano—those common

men about the field, world over,

of sugar, cotton, corn or clover

who are unsung but who remain

perpetual as the passing wind,

unkillable as the frail grass;

who, from their graves within their graves,

nourish the splendour of the earth

and give her substance, give her worth.

 

Poets and artists turn again,

construct your cunning tapestries

upon the ages of their acres,

the endless labours of their years;

still at the centre of their world

cultivate the first green graces,

courage, strength and kindliness,

love of man and beast and landscape;

still sow and graft the primal good,

green boughs of innocence to God.