The Passing of a Great Man

September isn’t just the month that ushers St. Lucian children back to the classroom after their extended summer vacation or the penultimate month to the island’s all-consuming Jounen Kweyol Festival. It is also the month that George William Odlum (24 June 1934 – 28 September 2003), perhaps the nation’s most renowned (but definitely its most charismatic, controversial and enigmatic) politician, credited with raising the nation’s social and political consciousness, traded his earthly life for (what one suspects) a passage to Valhalla, where he is no doubt feasting lustily with the likes of other such fallen heroes as Walter Rodney, Morris Bishop, and Tim Hector.

To commemorate the life of George Odlum and to get a better sense of why this Caribbean hero, who never became prime minister, has such a hold on St. Lucia’s collective imagination, we are pleased to invite you to sup on the book, They Called Him Brother George: Portrait of a Caribbean Politician (2023), and three secondary school student essays titled The Greatness of George Odlum.

We are even more pleased, delighted even, to share with you, Modeste Downes’ poem, The Passing of a Great Man, that effectively immortalized the fallen hero.

The Passing of a Great Man

Like a mighty oak
in time’s forested valley,
you came crashing down
with a pre-empting thud;
And the smaller oaks around you
twirled and whimpered
at your falling,
While bigger, more towering oaks,
In fraternal sincerity
or impious ostentations,
Bowed solemnly
and sang sweet hosannahs
to your name
that detonated like a cannon.

Petty creatures in the ’hood
put on wings,
and in unnumbered masses,
volleyed over the voiled earth
to see, perchance to touch
That felled thing
that had quaked the muted earth,
Even beyond the rims
Of these pampered shores
that awoke too late
to accept your worth.

And that calvaried place,
The Golgotha of your sanitised hospital room
where your ghost
took leave of your mortal remains
and shuttled off to its maker,
The tale is told
of how your tough bark,
Your battle-scarred skin
That had weathered so many storms
seemed pitifully incapable
of containing your hallowed sinews.

Our wretched world,
like mummified Bedouins,
now looks on
at your gravel and mortar castle
that ill-befits your titanic mold,
Vastly ignoring the message of your dying:
That the peopled earth is in fact one,
as you squeezed that unity
out of beckoned comrades’ flesh;
And the last remaining of the Musketeers
squeezed flesh and a tear
In reading those potent lines,
the confiteor of your political gospel;

In parting, you taught too,
That truth is truth,
though we spite the carrier
or scorn the parchment on which it is inscribed;
And that the forest
that grew that once mighty oak,
Is no more incapable now,
of producing other oaks
to replace felled ones;
That ‘the struggle’ that took your life
must not die with your passing;
And that, finally
the forest be sheltered
by a canopy of love,
that all may grow unwanting,
Bearing fruit that is pleasing,
till we face the Eternal Logger.

About Modeste Downes

Ranked in the top ten of St. Lucia’s all-time best poets, Modeste Downes has published three critically acclaimed collections of poetry—Phases (2005), Theatre of the Mind (2012), and A Lesson on Wings (2019). He was the winner of the 2004 George Odlum Award for Creative Artists; Phases, was the winner of the 2005 M&C Main Prize for literature; and Theatre of the Mind was the winner of the 2012 CDF Arts Award for poetry. The poet was born and raised in the Vieux Fort area and is among a small cohort of writers who are giving rise to a distinguished body of southern literature that is among the best of what the island has to offer.

The Passing of a Great Man

The Passing of a Great Man

About Modeste Downes

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