They crouch in the barge and the palms roll close,
Green echo, high over sand, of waves,
Of gray jelly-fish in smoke-puffs whose
Invisible sting is swift and leaden.
They crouch, tongue-dry, in the boat,
And all the world is a puny beach-head:
World of clean-sliced hemispheres,
Of latitudes of love and crime,
Peopled with the mental smears
Of medieval magic, thinning
To a short horizon
Under war’s tremendous engine.
That glittering hierarchy down
Through which the war blood streams, and great
Einsteinian logistics, drown
Upon this coast of conquest. Here is
· All of war, compact.
It is simple. It is death-fear.
Undiscriminating death
Appraises his approaching guests,
Uniform in gear, beneath
Which shiver bodies, black and white skinned,
But uniform in value
As currency of life. Their insight
Penetrates the island’s pull,
Magnetic jointure of here-after.
Across the rail, the Negro full
In death’s face stares and blinks, beside him
Son of owners of slaves,
Floating to a mortal hyphen, tongue-tied.
And the hyphen joins the puzzled past:
The tired way, down which they came,
Twin exile of historic trust,-
And fades in the jungle’s blinding chaos.
For on that final range
Men sprawled, too patient in the wave lay
Letting the gently anxious foam
Entomb their scars in sand. No scales
Enamel the minds of two from whom
All memory soon may fee. The Negro
And the Southern man
Reflect how inner bondage subtly
Links them to oppose what fought.
At home between them: tenant house
Of jerried boards, and house it wrought
Of moonbeam pillars; loom of clod-veined
Overalls that wove
Tradition’s silky gown. The drained blood
Mirrors doubly self and war,
Retreating in the glasses to
Extinction. The Negro fighting for
A freedom fraud, the white for freedom
Mortgaged to mistrust,
Fight to shield the bigot’s long breed.
And while the boat rolled on the waves,
Palm surf roaring at their face,
The Negro felt, not as on slaves,
The white hand on his arm, and heard him:
“We can do it, can’t we?”
And some familiar thing was lost words.
The strakes grate on the shore, defy
Horizon turned foreground of slaughter.
Whether I, the Negro, lie
Here or return, by all past tokens,
Medals are for white men,
Jim Crow life for me and my folk.
Upon the coral shingle they leap
And rush the smoking jungle. Round
Their legs the salt-curls break and seep,
Crumbling soon the mold of footprints.
Streaks of red, shell-studded,
Blot in sand, in waves are washed mute.
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