Derek Walcott
A City's Death By Fire
After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky, I wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by fire; Under a candle’s eye, that smoked in tears, I Wanted to
Koening Of The River
Koening knew now there was no one on the river. Entering its brown mouth choking with lilies And curtained with midges, Koenig poled the shallop Past the abandoned ferry and the ferry piles Coated
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
The Schooner 'Flight'
1 Adios, Carenage In idle August, while the sea soft, And leaves of brown islands stick to the rim Of this Carribean, I blow out the light By the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
After The Storm
There are so many islands! As many islands as the stars at night On that branched tree from which meteors are shaken Like falling fruit around the schooner Flight. But things must fall, and
In The Virgins
You can’t put in the ground swell of the organ From the Christiansted, St. Croix, Anglican Church Behind the paratrooper’s voice: “Turned cop After Vietnam. I made thirty jumps.” Bells punish the dead street
Pentecost
Better a jungle in the head Than rootless concrete. Better to stand bewildered By the fireflies’ crooked street; Winter lamps do not show Where the sidewalk is lost, Nor can these tongues of snow
Dark August
So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky Of this black August. My sister, the sun, Broods in her yellow room and won’t come out. Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
Codicil
Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles, One a hack’s hired prose, I earn Me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles, Tan, burn To slough off This live of ocean that’s self-love. To
Forest Of Europe
The last leaves fell like notes from a piano And left their ovals echoing in the ear; With gawky music stands, the winter forest Looks like an empty orchestra, its lines Ruled on these
A Far Cry From Africa
A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt Of Africa, Kikuyu, quick as flies, Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries: “Waste
R. T. S. L. (1917-1977)
As for that other thing Which comes when the eyelid is glazed And the wax gleam From the unwrinkled forehead Asks no more questions Of the dry mouth, Whether they open the heart like
Midsummer, Tobago
Broad sun-stoned beaches. White heat. A green river. A bridge, Scorched yellow palms From the summer-sleeping house Drowsing through August. Days I have held, Days I have lost, Days that outgrow, like daughters, My
Coral
This coral’s hape ecohes the hand It hollowed. Its Immediate absence is heavy. As pumice, As your breast in my cupped palm. Sea-cold, its nipple rasps like sand, Its pores, like yours, shone with
Blues
Those five or six young guys Lunched 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.
The Star-Apple Kingdom
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral In those shires of the island where the cattle drank Their pools of shadow from an older sky, Surviving from when the landscape copied such objects
Sabbaths, W. I
Those villages stricken with the melancholia of Sunday, In all of whose ocher streets one dog is sleeping Those volcanoes like ashen roses, or the incurable sore Of poverty, around whose puckered mouth thin
Egypt, Tobago
There is a shattered palm On this fierce shore, Its plumes the rusting helm- Et of a dead warrior. Numb Antony, in the torpor Stretching her inert Sex near him like a sleeping cat,
Parang
Man, I suck me tooth when I hear How dem croptime fiddlers lie, And de wailing, kiss-me-arse flutes That bring water to me eye! Oh, when I t’ink how from young I wasted time
The Saddhu Of Couva
When sunset, a brass gong, Vibrate through Couva, Is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed, Like a white cattle bird growing more small Over the ocean of the evening canes, And I sit