The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 by Derek Walcott

Author:Derek Walcott
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466874459
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

III

At the Queen’s Park Hotel, with its white, high-ceilinged rooms,

I reenter my first local mirror. A skidding roach

in the porcelain basin slides from its path to Parnassus.

Every word I have written took the wrong approach.

I cannot connect these lines with the lines in my face.

The child who died in me has left his print on

the tangled bed linen, and it was his small voice

that whispered from the gargling throat of the basin.

Out on the balcony I remember how morning was:

It was like a granite corner in Piero della Francesca’s

“Resurrection,” the cold, sleeping foot

prickling like the small palms up by the Hilton.

On the dewy Savannah, gently revolved by their grooms,

snorting, delicate-ankled racehorses exercise,

as delicate-ankled as brown smoke from the bakeries.

Sweat darkens their sides, and dew has frosted the skins

of the big American taxis parked all night on the street.

In black asphalt alleys marked by a ribbon of sunlight,

the closed faces of shacks are touched by that phrase in Traherne:

“The corn was orient and immortal wheat,”

and the canefields of Caroni. With all summer to burn,

a breeze strolls down to the docks, and the sea begins.

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