Coral

By Derek Walcott

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,

Creates an exact absence like this stoneSet on a table with a whitening rack

Of souvenirs. It dares my hand

To claim what lovers' hands have never known:

The nature of the body of another. 

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. 

My first friend was the sea.Now,is my last. 

I stop talking now.I work,then I read, 

cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast. 

I try to forget what happiness was, 

and when that don't work,I study the stars. 

Sometimes is just me,and the soft-scissored foam 

as the deck turn white and the moon open 

a cloud like a door,and the light over me 

is a road in white moonlight taking me home. 

Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea. 

Night In The Gardens Of Port Of Spain 

Night, the black summer, simplifies her smells

into a village; she assumes the impenetrable

musk of the negro, grows secret as sweat, 

her alleys odorous with shucked oyster shells, 

coals of gold oranges, braziers of melon.

Commerce and tambourines increase her heat.

Hellfire or the whorehouse: crossing Park Street, 

a surf of sailor's faces crest, is gone

with the sea's phosphoresence; the boites-de-nuit

tinkle like fireflies in her thick hair.

Blinded by headlamps, deaf to taxi klaxons, 

she lifts her face from the cheap, pitch oil flare

toward white stars, like cities, flashing neon, 

burning to be the bitch she must become.

As daylight breaks the coolie turns his tumbril

of hacked, beheaded coconuts towards home. 

Becune Point

Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows

hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers.

Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse

or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands, daggers

of agave bristle in primordial defense,

like a cornered monster backed up against the sea.

A mongoose charges dry grass and fades through a fence

faster than an afterthought. Dust rises easily.

Haze of the Harmattan, Sahara dust, memory’s haze

from the dried well of Africa, the headland’s desert

or riders in swirling burnooses, mixed with the greys

of hills veiled in Impressionist light. We inherit

two worlds of associations, or references, drought

that we heighten into Delacroix’s North Africa,

veils, daggers, lances, herds the Harmattan brought

with a phantom inheritance, which the desperate seeker

of a well-spring staggers in the heat in search of—

heroic ancestors; the other that the dry season brings

is the gust of a European calendar, but it is the one love

that thirsts for confirmations in the circling rings

of the ground dove’s cooing on stones, in the acacia’s

thorns and the agave’s daggers, that they are all ours,

the white horsemen of the Sahara, India’s and Asia’s

plumed mongoose and crested palmtree, Benin and Pontoise.

We are history’s afterthought, as the mongoose races

ahead of its time; in drought we discover our shadows,

our origins that range from the most disparate places,

from the dugouts of Guinea to the Nile’s canted dhows.

                                   II

The incredible blue with its bird-inviting cloud,

in which there are crumbling towers, banners and domes,

and the sliding Carthage of sunsets, the marble shroud

drawn over associations that are Greece’s and Rome’s

and rarely of Africa. They continue at sixty-seven

to echo in the corridors of the head, perspectives

of a corridor in the Vatican that led, not to heaven,

but to more paintings of heaven, ideas in lifted sieves

drained by satiety because great art can exhaust us,

and even the steadiest faith can be clogged by excess,

the self-assured Christs, the Madonnas’ inflexible postures

without the mess of motherhood. With this blue I bless

emptiness where these hills are barren of tributes

and the repetitions of power, our sky’s naive

ceiling without domes and spires, an earth whose roots

like the thorned acacia’s deepen my belief.

Derek Walcott (1930–2017)

Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. He published his first poem in the local newspaper at the age of 14. Five years later, he borrowed $200 to print his first collection, 25 Poems, which he distributed on street corners. Walcott’s major breakthrough came with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), a book which celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the scars of colonialism and post-colonialism. Throughout a long and distinguished career, Walcott returned to those same themes of language, power, and place. His later collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), Selected Poems (2007), White Egrets (2010), and Morning, Paramin (2016). In 1992, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee described his work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment.”

Since the 1950s Walcott divided his time between Boston, New York, and Saint Lucia. His work resonates with Western canon and Island influences, sometimes even shifting between Caribbean patois and English, and often addressing his English and West Indian ancestry. According to Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Arthur Vogelsang, “These continuing polarities shoot an electricity to each other which is questioning and beautiful and which helps form a vision altogether Caribbean and international, personal (him to you, you to him), independent, and essential for readers of contemporary literature on all the continents.” Known for his technical control, erudition, and large canvases, Walcott was, according to poet and critic Sean O’Brien, “one of the handful of poets currently at work in English who are capable of making a convincing attempt to write an epic … His work is conceived on an oceanic scale and one of its fundamental concerns is to give an account of the simultaneous unity and division created by the ocean and by human dealings with it.”

Many readers and critics point to Omeros (1990), an epic poem reimagining the Trojan War as a Caribbean fishermen’s fight, as Walcott’s major achievement. The book is “an effort to touch every aspect of Caribbean experience,” according to O’Brien who also described it as an ars poetica, concerned “with art itself—its meaning and importance and the nature of an artistic vocation.” In reviewing Walcott’s Selected Poems (2007), poet Glyn Maxwell ascribes Walcott’s power as a poet not so much to his themes as to his ear: “The verse is constantly trembling with a sense of the body in time, the self slung across metre, whether metre is steps, or nights, or breath, whether lines are days, or years, or tides.”

Walcott was also a renowned playwright. In 1971 he won an Obie Award for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, which the New Yorker described as “a poem in dramatic form.” Walcott’s plays generally treat aspects of the West Indian experience, often dealing with the socio-political and epistemological implications of post-colonialism and drawing upon various forms such as the fable, allegory, folk, and morality play. With his twin brother, he cofounded the Trinidad Theater Workshop in 1950; in 1981, while teaching at Boston University, he founded the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre. He also taught at Columbia University, Yale University, Rutgers University, and Essex University in England.

In addition to his Nobel Prize, Walcott’s honors included a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, and, in 1988, the Queen’s Medal for Poetry. He was an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in 2017.