Poems by Derek Walcott

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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 salt sweat.

Bodies in absence displace their weight,

And your smooth body, like none other,

Derek Walcott

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 with coal dust. Staying aboard, he saw, up

in a thick meadow, a sand-colored mule,

untethered, with no harness, and no signs

of habitation round the ruined factory wheel

Derek Walcott

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 quiet, waiting for it to return

like a hog-cattle blistered with mud,

because, for my spirit, India is too far.

Derek Walcott

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,

knows his heart is the real desert.

Derek Walcott

RTSL (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 a shirt

to release a rage of swallows,

Derek Walcott

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 change your language you must change your life.

I cannot right old wrongs.

Derek Walcott

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

like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,

she will not rise and turn off the rain.

She is in her room, fondling old things,

my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls

Derek Walcott

Sabbaths, WI

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 boys are

selling yellow sulphur stone

the burnt banana leaves that used to dance

the river whose bed is made of broken bottles

the cocoa grove where a bird whose cry sounds green and

Derek Walcott

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 at de fetes,

I could bawl in a red-eyed rage

For desire turned to regret,

Derek Walcott

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 so it always was,

on one hand Venus,on the other Mars;

fall,and are one,just as this earth is one

island in archipelagoes of stars.

Derek Walcott

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

speak for the Holy Ghost;

Derek Walcott

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 as

"Herefords at Sunset in the valley of the Wye."

The mountain water that fell white from the mill wheel

sprinkling like petals from the star-apple trees,

and all of the windmills and sugar mills moved by mules

Derek Walcott