THE DEAD IN MELANESIA
Beside the crater and the tattered palm
The trades, the old trades, sight their local psalm;
Buth their man-god in his outrigger,
The boars' tusks curling like a nautilus,
Fell to the schooners cruising here for niggers.
To the
Natur~
here these deaths are fabulous;
And yet this world works, grain by grain, into the graves
Till the poor
ronin
in their tank-sealed caves
Are troubled by its alien genius
That takes uncomprehendingly the kites, the snow–
Their decomposing traces. And the conquerors
Who hid their single talent in Chicago,
Des Moines, Cheyenne, are buried with it here.
The including land, mistaking their success,
Takes the tall strangers to its heart like failures:
Each missionary, with his base and cross,
Sprawls in the blood of an untaken beachhead;
And the isles confuse him with their own black dead.
309
RANDALL jARRELL
