IF WHEN THEY BROUGHT THE NEWS

If when they brought him the good news
he said there is God in Heaven,
think:
In the village
where the streets are asphalt complications
of old Guaca’s simple comings-in and goings-out, where, by the hidden midden,
Mrs. Ramsey’s Tea-Shop stands,
old Guaca would have understood
with an understanding mutilated
before and during his time.

This Carib head – that was so hard
a Spanish broadsword could not cleave it at one stroke,
would have recognised with implicit glance
like the fact, but not the complications, of the three strange ships
that Maboya had a vanquisher apt to be appeased with sacrifice:
That Don Alonzo and the Capuchins
one with sword and fire,
the other with Fire And The Sword were servants of The One King of all the Kingdoms.
And Mrs. Ramsey,
sweetening her stained cup, would have looked up
through her wayward daughter (equal to herself),
the soldiers of beer,
the salt cries of hard-working blinded men
(Shrines, wherein the Eternal Light glimmered)
to a Store of Ambrosia

When, in fact, all that had been said was
There is God in Heaven, and for example,
It was all of the moment when Pinzon shouted “Land!”