Derek Walcott - The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. CONTENTS Owing to limitations of space, the epic poem Omeros (1990) has not been included in this collection, but it is available from FSG (ISBN: 978-0-374-52350-3). To Elizabeth, Anna, and Peter FROM 25 Poems (1949) THE FISHERMEN ROWING HOMEWARD The fishermen rowing homeward in the dusk, Do not consider the stillness through which they move.

So I since feelings drown, should no more ask What twilight and safety your strong hands gave. And the night, urger of the old lies Winked at by stars that sentry the humped hills, Should hear no words of faring forth, for time knows That bitter and sly sea, and love raises walls. Yet others, who now watch my progress outward To a sea which is crueler than any word Of love, may see in me the calm my voyage makes, Parting new water in the antique hoax. And the secure from thinking may climb safe to liners, Hearing small rumors of paddlers drowned near stars. IN MY EIGHTEENTH YEAR for Warwick Walcott Having measured the years today by the calendar That tells your seventeenth death, I stayed until It was the honest time to remember How the house has lived with and without you well. And I do not chide deaths hand, Nor can I hurl death taunts or tantrums Because the washing faiths my father walked are no more light, And all the gulls that were tall as his dreams Are one with his light rotting in the sand.

Nor can I hurl taunts or tantrums. Or blast with syllables the yellow grave Under the crooked tree where all Lazarus is history. But greater than most is deaths gift, that can Behind the bright dust that was the skeleton, (Who drank the wine and believed the blessed bread) Can make us see the forgotten price of man Shine from the perverse beauty of the dead. PRIVATE JOURNAL We started from places that saw no gay carracks wrecked And where our green solitudes did not look deciduous; And afternoons after schools, well our aunt Sorrow came, Disciplined, erect, To teach us writing. Outside boyhoods chased their leather Football along the level glare of playing fields, and Sweated and cursed amiably, while we sat, with slow tears Shaping the hearts weather. It is too early or too late, to ask if we were gifted With this pain that saw all, yet was no mans remedy, Blessed or cursed with vision that saw growths long confusion That time has not lifted? We learned to hate from too much rumor, friends and masters, The bully who jeered because we could not swim at nine, And the blond child, the one with too much money; then liked These eccentric wasters Of time, who could not see like us their deep affliction; Of whom we envy now industrious idleness, their Ability to forget or postpone death as an Inevitable fiction.

And love came, cracked the hearts it joined just as love ought, Was our tallest delight and our deepest affliction, Taught us more than philosophy did that we wanted Freedom from, not of, thought. LETTER TO A PAINTER IN ENGLAND Where you rot under the strict gray industry Of cities of fog and winter fevers, I Send this to remind you of personal islands For which Gauguins sicken, and to explain How I have grown to know your passionate Talent and this wild love of landscape. It is April and already no doubt for you As the journals report, the prologues of spring Appear behind the rails of city parks, Or the late springtime must be publishing Pink apologies along the black wet branch To men in overcoats, who will conceal The lines of songs leaping behind their pipes. And you must find it difficult to imagine This April as a season where the tide burns Black; leaves crack into ashes from the drought; A dull red burning like hearts desolation. The roads are white with dust and the leaves Of the trees have a nervous spinsterish quiet. And walking under the trees today I saw The canoes that are marked with comic names Daylight , St.

Mary Magdalene , Gay Girl . Made me think of your chief scenes for painting And days of instruction at the soft villa When we watched your serious experience, learning. And you must understand how I am lost To see my gifts rotting under this season You who defined with an imperious palette The several postures of this virginal island You understand how I am lost to have Your brushs zeal and not to be explicit. But the grace we avoid, that gave us vision, Discloses around curves an architecture whose Sunday logic we can take or refuse, And leaves to the simple soul its own decision After landscapes, palms, cathedrals or the hermit-thrush And wins my love now and gives it a silence That would inform the blind world of its flesh. A CITYS DEATH BY FIRE After that hot gospeler had leveled all but the churched sky, I wrote the tale by tallow of a citys death by fire. Under a candles eye that smoked in tears, I Wanted to tell in more than wax of faiths that were snapped like wire.

All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales, Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar, Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales Torn open by looting and white in spite of the fire; By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked why Should a man wax tears when his wooden world fails. In town leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails, Blessing the death and the baptism by fire. AS JOHN TO PATMOS As John to Patmos, among the rocks and the blue live air, hounded His heart to peace, as here surrounded By the strewn silver on waves, the woods crude hair, the rounded Breasts of the milky bays, palms, flocks, and the green and dead Leaves, the suns brass coin on my cheek, where Canoes brace the suns strength, as John in that bleak air, So am I welcomed richer by these blue scapes Greek there, So I will voyage no more from home, may I speak here. This island is heaven away from the dustblown blood of cities, See the curve of bay, watch the straggling flower, pretty is The winged sound of trees, the sparse powdered sky when lit is The night. For beauty has surrounded These black children, and freed them of homeless ditties. As John to Patmos, among each love-leaping air, O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear What I swear now, as John did, To praise lovelong the living and the brown dead.

I WITH LEGS CROSSED ALONG THE DAYLIGHT WATCH I with legs crossed along the daylight watch The variegated fists of clouds that gather over The uncouth features of this my prone island. Meanwhile the steamers that disturb our lost horizons prove Us lost. Found only In tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars; Found in the pale reflection of eyes That know cities, and think us here happy. Time creeps over the patient who are too long patient. So I, who have made one choice, Discover that my boyhood has gone over. And my life, too early of course for the profound cigarette, The turned doorhandle, the knife turning In the bowels of the hours, must not be made public Until I have learnt to suffer In accurate iambics.

I go of course through all the isolated acts, Make a holiday of situations; Straighten my tie and fix important jaws, And note the living images Of flesh that saunter through the eye. Until from all I turn to think how In the middle of the journey through my life O how I came upon you, my Reluctant leopard of the slow eyes. FROM Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949) CANTO II Voyaging, In the first strong wind, gathering purpose, We observed the wreckage drifting at morning, Signifying Land, and flotsam of other purposes, And then the sun, White birds, blue wave arched with porpoise, To the left A rim of fragile islands, virginal, Noise of leaves in sails, purple underside of gulls, Fishpots and canoes, Other existence sharpening the senses. Talk less of solitudes, corners of lonely talent, Behind the meek applause and mental skirmishes Solitudes are sucked like sails and dreams will drown. The ghosts vanish, stars fall like eyes, And only sour legends of the sea and oily winds remain To sprawl my boyhood on a dung of words. When I see children walk a light of mildness, Wearing in their flesh the hope I was, I cry to time of the hoax of martyrdoms, I would warn, fearing To break old enchantments.