Black Islands Continued (3)

Father Martin de Munilla at Espiritu Santo: 1606 

We sailed into a great bay a small river

between the headlands four months fourteen days

from Peru dense forest wilderness hills rise

St Phillips St James Quirós names the bay

in the new unknown comfort of old names

a supposed continent becomes Austrialia

Del Espiritu Santo if it be

island or Main may be beyond measure

future plains beyond forests misty green

as babes wishes we hold them to our breasts

feed them milk of holy names history 

we convince ourselves will see us well blessed

discoverers of dreams reality sees

black heathen feathered spears angry bees

shouting darting briefly shadows trees

Dark dashes out stabbing red topped sticks

in the sand boats answer with harquebus

aimed high echoing silence rules the beach

smoke from the hillside seems to invite us

homesick for the peasant farms of homeland

what we find becomes far from domestic

the sounds we followed shouts chants sticks rattled  

might have been the best of Satan's hectic

jeers blindly our sturdy harquebus fires

high in trees until a deserted village

after months of salt-beef baskets of yams

pigs tethered in a row I granted pillage

it was not fit that Spanish should not eat

while the savages feasted on yams fresh meat

we taste fruits while yams pork flavor the heat

                       (break)

A month much health restored I bless the gifts

of food God's nature yields natives untouched

left nought but to hunt fish our course now shifts

south to explore on a stormy Thursday

yams smoked-pork coconuts stored we weigh

our anchors are more blown than sailed away

                       Dance 

Those colorless men who paddled backward

second eyes beneath the strange leaves covering

their heads these pale men whose spears barked and smoked

are gone so our men dance the women sing

men too young chant and drum so we all come

alive again those who lead are men who

have twice payed with circle pig tusks who are men

so high when they dance the trees will dance too

trees lean and sway fire rises to light the sky

while they dance the night away we rock clap

sing as drums come into us our hearts drum

we are alive again free from the wrap

colorless men bound around our world the fear

we'd never felt before the cobweb ghost circling

the ring is ours the hunter's heart beats

we feel too as they stiffly stalk and spring

throw their dream spears so when black hawk sweeps in

arms spread wide we rise to greet the morning

             Friar Maleo de Vascones

                    

Four months after Espiritu Santo

Friar Munilla sickened died at mid-night

ides of October sixteen-hundred-six

like bundled dry sticks dropped out of our sight

those eighty-year old bones lightly slipped sailcloth

to sink the banner of St Francis his shroud

for epitaph he'd written He chose the path

the fate of his voyage he wondered aloud

not knowing was new land he blessed country

or island nor do I half prayer half dream he

walks there now his dreamed fertile field valley

gentle breeze our world his revery

              Continental Drift

Not easy to get the drift of continents

it's no surprise his prize escaped the last

persistent conquistador turned explorer

the fabled southern continent however vast

it might drift many million years miles so well

it might be as fabled as was dreamed indeed free

to drift in confusion those years before

Quirós set sail we shouldn't assign blame he

nor Torres wouldn't know land could be there here

move around so time enough time to spare

for pieces of Pacifica to reappear

among the Aleutians or to flair

in the Andes the rest furtive as a kiss

despite its dimensions easy to miss

Black Islands Continued (2)

Maps of Quirós: 1598

Unknown southern continent uncovered

as a woman blind and her lover in

the visceral dark we find explore share

our ignorance these uncertain faint thin

strings wordless by intent without design

lines we draw of one another meaningless

disconnected in daylight curved insular

strokes might be something of a shape we guess

a blind reader feels excitement or bliss

from feeling and the slightest touch a swell

of breast or a bay of thighs an island's

sudden promontory faint lines that may well

mark the corner of a chart which uncurled

outlines vast lands which balance half our world

in which we may share our visits flags  unfurled

                  Star Paths

Islands are green stars in a deep water sky

as broad as the one cast over us nightly 

a reed mat where light sparks are held so high

we sail between them and their reflections

and we needn't know or name every star yet

we sense where they are just as we know where

parts of our body are in the darkest net

of night even children's fingers as they could

with fiber threads pick patterns from formless air

so we're children again sailing empty seas

in patterns that may not seem to be there

but our boat feels the currents our bellies

feel the lift beneath the waves confusion 

for there where a star sank the cloud we saw

as if fixed by trees was no illusion

to which birds fly but a green effusion

The Black Islands

        I wrote the first draft of Black Islands almost 40 years ago and spent the last 6 months reviving and revising the the poems and presentation. I'll just give you the title page today and try to remember to add the content bit by bit.

Black  Islands

Robert M. Chute

All that has been lost in America

may be gained in Australis del

Espiritu Santo. It seems as if

God kept the better and the richer

lands to the last…

.

                                                            Petro Quirós (1506)

Between the Solomon's, New Caledonia, and Fiji lies the cluster 

of islands, reefs, shoals, and live volcanoes which Captain Cook, 

with singular inappropriateness, named  the New Hebrides. To the 

confusion of topography, vegetation, and native peoples white man 

has added his destructive genius,so that the archipelago now stands 

unchallenged as one  of the unhealthiest, wildest, most mistreated, 

and the most mismanaged spots on earth.

                                          Oliver: The Pacific Islands (1961)

Well I might as well give you the first page…

Author's Introduction

About thirty-five years ago I read Thomas Harrison's book, Savage Civilization, for me a compelling account of his experience in the Pacific islands known as The New Hebrides. As a consequence I spent hours of reading and research, fitted between preparation for teaching and research in Biology, and wrote a series of poems dealing with the people of those islands.

In an optimistic trial for publication I received encouragement but the suggestion, twice, that some uniformity in the form of the poems would fit the general uniformity of the content. Other interests intervened, some, dealing with the civil-rights movement, indirectly related to the poems since a better term to identify the islands would be Melanesia. How much trouble that pigment has generated in pale minded pale people.

In any case here are the poems approximately 450 years after those island's first recorded european contact. About a year ago they surfaced in my disordered files and I decided to revise them. The form of the originals had no uniformity. These revisions are based on a ten syllable line with the even numbered lines rhymed: the end of each major section a couplet, triplet or even quartet. I offer no defense for this decision since I have none, nor for the omission of punctuation —unless I wanted the reader to have to stop and think from time to time.  

Polynesia, Micronesia, Melanesia: many islands, tiny islands, black islands.Melanesia, as a geographic, cultural entity, stretches southeasterly from New Guinea and the Solomon's to Fiji. The southern foundry includes New Caledonia but not New Zealand.  It is the Polynesians and Micronesians who are the "noble savages" of South Pacific romance. They are taller, more european in appearance, and, significantly, lighter in color with straight hair. Shades of South Africa and Old Black Joe.