The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (2 page)

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 death's 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 death's 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 heart's weather.

It is too early or too late, to ask if we were gifted

With this pain that saw all, yet was no man's remedy,

Blessed or cursed with vision that saw growth's 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 heart's 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 brush's 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 CITY'S DEATH BY FIRE

After that hot gospeler had leveled 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 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 wood's crude hair, the rounded

Breasts of the milky bays, palms, flocks, and the green and dead

Leaves, the sun's brass coin on my cheek, where

Canoes brace the sun's 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. A heart cracked early

Never heals.

O wrong river, salt as tears.

The years bring honors, prefect, wise at school,

Solemn investigation of inch-high corruptions;

Responsibility comes long before

The first shaving set.

Islands curved like the fling of a stone to sea,

Beach white at morning, a cloudless sky,

The first island unhaunted, quiet.

We put into a bay with a wide beach eager to land,

There was

                           No tenant sound of bird in the dry season,

                           No awful ruin, broken temples in the clearing,

                           Or sudden departure from camp, fire still smoking,

                           No wailing bird or marauder,

                           No cracked crucifix, only

The doomed lushness of a green mind

Beginning to nurse its death with images, ambitions,

Unwilling to exile the fine anxiety.

The gifted, seeking out gnarled holes of solitude,

Separate in crowds, lonely and laughing,

Transfer their hate of self to love of objects,

Early are nursed by nature to the hermitage,

Instinctive always with migratory companions,

Nursing neurosis like a potted plant.

Younger, painting meant honesty to us,

Sexless as statue we felt her passionate mouth

Bury us in desire for freedom. Rebellion

Is the death I suffer from; that hope

I fished like dreams at noon, prevents and stores me up

And will not let me live like animal.

Not with excesses, but thoughtless and satisfied,

While like an arrowing pylon by hardening talent

Shot to the clouds, the boy I was is weakening.

I hear the power I possess knock at my roots,

And see the tower of myself whose height attracts

Destruction, begin a crazy crack and waltz of ruin.

In that villa, overlooking the town

We did not learn much, but we were secure

On Saturdays, in the smell of oil and paint.

With the dry leaves rustling outside like the sea,

Like wind in sails, leaves scraping along the roof like rats.

Outside

The hill looked on a neutral summer,

The low peninsula, the smooth invitation of the bay,

The rocks warm, dotting the slope,

The sheep punctual and pastoral crossed the hillside grass,

And then at evening again the broad light dying

From the exiling sea.

In a seclusion that only tempted thought,

All actions inform retreat is safest.

Supine or pained, thought troubles us, sirs,

When I am twisted in bed like yesterday's paper.

FROM

Poems

(1957)

THE DORMITORY

Time is the guide that brings all to a crux,

Who hangs his map will move

Out of the mere geology of books,

To see his valley's palm wrinkled with loves.

These sleep like islands, and I watch sleep lick

Their arms' flung promontories, remove

With individual erasure all their love

Of muscle. Now towards the sea there, I look

Where rippling signatures of water break

Over the sighing dormitories of

The drowned whom soft winds move,

Here these inquiet mouths like rivers speak.

Or from these boys, who in the uncertain luck

Of sleep, expect to live,

The breath curls from their separated lips like

Mists of time that over valleys grieve.

TO NIGEL

O child as guiltless as the grass,

From that green country of your eyes,

I cannot tell you how you pass

Into this country, where the skies

Are ominous all afternoon;

Into the cold and adult lies

Around a naked guiltless past;

Into this country where the leaves

Drop in incalculable waste

Of what was young and therefore dies;

Into this country where the light,

Being kind and murderous to the trees

Will not teach itself how to last

But bleeds again into the night

Then breaks into a pox of stars.

O boy, whose breath, however slight

Shakes my grown tree of veins to toss