Derek Walcott: Poems

Watch Nobel Prize laureate Derek Walcott and his czech translator Miroslav Jindra reading at 21. Prague Writers' Festival (2nd part of the streaming archive).

Prelude

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 which divide horizons prove

Us lost;

Found only

In tourist booklets, behind ardent binoculars;

Found in the blue reflection of eyes

That have known 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,

0 how I came upon you, my

Reluctant leopard of the slow eyes.

Blues

Those five or six young guys

hunched on the stoop

that oven-hot summer night

whistled me over. Nice

and friendly. So, I stop.

MacDougal or Christopher

Street in chains of light.

A summer festival. Or some

saint's. I wasn't too far from

home, but not too bright

for a nigger, and not too dark.

I figured we were all

one, wop, nigger, jew,

besides, this wasn't Central Park.

I'm coming on too strong? You figure

right! They beat this yellow nigger

black and blue.

Yeah. During all this, scared

in case one used a knife,

I hung my olive-green, just-bought

sports coat on a fire plug.

I did nothing. They fought

each other, really. Life

gives them a few kicks,

that's all. The spades, the spicks.

My face smashed in, my bloody mug

pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved

from cuts and tears,

I crawled four flights upstairs.

Sprawled in the gutter, I

remember a few watchers waved

loudly, and one kid's mother shouting

like "Jackie" or "Terry,"

"now that's enough!"

It's nothing really.

They don't get enough love.

You know they wouldn't kill

you. Just playing rough,

like young America will.

Still, it taught me something

about love. If it's so tough,

forget it.

Sea Grapes

That sail which leans on light,

tired of islands,

a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,

home-bound on the Aegean;

that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is

like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name

in every gull's outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war

between obsession and responsibility

will never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore

now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,

since Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough

from whose groundswell the great hexameters come

to the conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Sea Canes

Half my friends are dead.

I will make you new ones, said earth.

No, give me them back, as they were, instead,

with faults and all, I cried.

Tonight I can snatch their talk

from the faint surf's drone

through the canes, but I cannot walk

on the moonlit leaves of ocean

down that white road alone,

or float with the dreaming motion

of owls leaving earth's load.

O earth, the number of friends you keep

exceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff flash green and silver;

they were the seraph lances of my faith,

but out of what is lost grows something stronger

that has the rational radiance of stone,

enduring moonlight, further than despair,

strong as the wind, that through dividing canes

brings those we love before us, as they were,

with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

Love After Love

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.