Eighty Candles for Derek Walcott

Today marks the 80th birthday of the Caribbean poet, playwright, and sometimes watercolorist Derek Walcott. To celebrate his work and years, I'll post a small poem-gift for you this weekend. (And yes, this is from a man who is, as you might have heard during last year's hullabaloo over the Oxford professorship of poetry, not only a man of verse but quite the fanny-pincher.)

The poem below is the first in Midsummer (1984), a copy of which I purchased in the basement of a tiny English-language bookshop in Athens three years ago. As you will notice from the opening line, this is a fine poem to take with you when traveling. Sometimes you can arrange the timing of the poem and of the plane just so, and read the last lines as the rubber wheels meet the landing strip. Without further ado, the promised poem:

The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud—

clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,

nor the sea's mirror, nor the coral busy with its own

culture; they aren't doors of dissolving stone,

but pages in a damp culture that come aprt.

So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast

dereliction of sunlight, there's that island known

to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude

for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet's shadow

ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow

through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome

and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,

it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,

light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor

around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words—

Maraval, Diego Martin—the highways long as regrets,

and steeples so tiny you couldn't hear the bells,

not the sharp exclamations of whitewashed minarets

from green villages. The lowering window resounds

over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.

Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets

are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.

It comes too fast—this shelving sense of home—

canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as

the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.