“Islands” by Derek Walcott

[For Margaret]

 

Merely to name them is the prose
Of diarists, to make you a name
For readers who like travellers praise
Their beds and beaches as the same;
But islands can only exist
If we have loved in them. I seek,
As climate seeks its style, to write
Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,
Cold as the curled wave, ordinary
As a tumbler of island water;
Yet, like a diarist, thereafter
I savour their salt-haunted rooms
(Your body stirring the creased sea
Of crumpled sheets), whose mirrors lose
Our huddled, sleeping images,
Like words which love had hoped to use
Erased with the surf’s pages.

So, like a diarist in sand,
I mark the peace with which you graced
Particular islands, descending
A narrow star to light the lamps
Against the night surf’s noises, shielding
A leaping mantle with one hand,
Or simply scaling fish for supper,
Onions, jack-fish, bread, red-snapper;
And on each kiss the harsh sea-taste,
And how by moonlight you were made
To study most the surf’s unyielding
Patience though it seemed a waste.

“The Banyan Tree, Old Year’s Night” by Derek Walcott

I

In the damp park, no larger than a stamp,
The rainbow bulbs of the year’s end are looped
To link the withered fountain, and each lamp
Flickers like echoes where small savage whores whooped.

The square was this town’s center, but its spokes
Burn like a petered pinwheel of dead streets,
Turning in mind the squibs of boyish jokes,
Candy-striped innocents and sticky sweets

Fading in lemon light, as ribbons fade;
Bring back the pumping mayor and the snails
Of tubas marching as the brass band played
For children punished in their window gaols,

And gusts of tumbling papers, babies, kites
Blown round the kiosk band rails in the wind;
But now these ghosts like wan bulbs show the whites
Of vanished eyes, and absence crowds the mind.

Soaring from littered roots, blackened with rain,
With inaccessible arms the banyan tree
Heaves in the year’s last drizzle to explain
What age could not, responsibility.

II

At this town’s rotting edges foul canals
Race with assurance when bad weather pours
White rain and wind by which the paper sails
Of crouched black children steer for little tours

Till the silt clogs them on the farther bank;
And the barques tilt, sunk in short voyages.
Yet, as they dare each season, so I thank
What wind compelled my flight, whatever rages

Urged my impossible exile; so with this park
I study now, as exiles stamp from home,
Fearing those bulbs will hiss out in the dark,
The mind be swept of truths as by a broom.

Even on silvery days, that classic fount
Being withered to the root, its throat as hoarse
As the last nurse’s cry, could not surmount
My growing fear with clarity from a source

No parent knew. Or did we march
To the brass tunes of truth? Did I divine
Some secret in the fountain’s failing arch,
And was that infant melancholy mine?

It it were so, it still remains, its sources
Blank as the rain on the deserted mind,
Dumb as the ancient Indian tree that forces
Its grieving arms to keep the homeless wind.

“Return to D’Ennery; Rain” by Derek Walcott

Imprisoned in these wires of rain, I watch
This village stricken with a single street,
Each weathered shack leans on a wooden crutch,
Contented as a cripple with defeat.
Five years ago even poverty seemed sweet,
So azure and indifferent was this air,
So murmurous of oblivion the sea,
That any human action seemed a waste,
The place seemed born for being buried there.

The surf explodes

In scissor-birds hunting the usual fish,
The rain is muddying unpaved inland roads,
So personal grief melts the general wish.

The hospital is quiet in the rain.
A naked boy drives pigs into the bush.
The coast shudders with every surge. The beach
Admits a beaten heron. Filth and foam.
There in a belt of emerald light, a sail
Plunges and lifts between the crests of reef,
The hills are smoking in the vaporous light,
The rain seeps slowly to the core of grief.
It could not change its sorrows and be home.

It cannot change, though you become a man
Who would exchange compassion for a drink,
Now you are brought to where manhood began
Its separation from “the wounds that make you think.”
And as this rain puddles the sand, it sinks
Old sorrows in the gutter of the mind;
Where is that passionate hatred that would help
The black, the despairing, the poor, by speech alone?
The fury shakes like wet leaves in the wind,
The rain beats on a brain hardened to stone.

For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when
Arrived at its anchor of suffering, a grave
Or a bed, despairing in action, we ask,
O God, where is our home? For no one will save
The world from itself, though he walk among men,
On such shores where the form
Murmurs oblivion of action, who raise
No cry like herons stoned by the rain.

The passionate exiles believe it, but the heart
Is circled by sorrows, by its horror
And bitter devotion to home.
The romantic nonsense ends at the bowspirit, shearing
But never arriving beyond the reef-shore foam,
Or the rain cuts us off from heaven’s hearing.

Why blame the faith you have lost? Heaven remains
Where it is, in the hearts of these people,
In the womb of their church, though the rain’s
Shroud is drawn across its steeple.