60 till the day whe n I can lean back and laugh, those claws that tickled my back on sweating Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand.' As I worked, watching the rotting waves come past the bow that scissor the sea like silk,
65 I swear to you all, by my mother's milk, by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace, that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home; I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.
70 You ever look up from some lonely beach and see a far schooner? Well, when I write this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line as tight as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech
3. Or bobol: corrupt practices or fraud, organized 4. Capital of the Bahamas. 'Monos': island off the by people in positions of power (Eastern Caribbean northwest coast of Trinidad. English). 5. South American monkey.
.
259 0 / DEREK WALCOTT
75 my common language go be the wind, my pages the sails of the schooner Flight.
1979
The Season of Phantasmal Peace
Then all the nations of birds lifted together the huge net of the shadows of this earth in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
5 the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes, the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets, the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill? the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
10 only this passage of phantasmal light that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.
And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
15 battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries, bearing the net higher, covering this world like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
20 that you will see at evening on the side of a hill in yellow October, and no one hearing knew what change had brought into the raven's cawing, the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough0 bird, in crow family such an immense, soundless, and high concern
25 for the fields and cities where the birds belong, except it was their seasonal passing, Love, made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth, something brighter than pity for the wingless ones below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
30 and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices above all change, betrayals of falling suns, and this season lasted one moment, like the pause between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.
1981
.
OMEROS, BOOK 1 / 2591
FROM OMEROS1
Book One
Chapter III
ill
'Mais qui qa qui rivait-'ous, Philoctete?'2 'Moin hlesse.
'But what is wrong wif you, Philoctete?' 'I am blest
wif this wound, Ma Kilman,4 qui pas ka guerir piece.
Which will never heal.' 'Well, you must take it easy. 5 Go home and lie down, give the foot a lickle' little (West Indian English) rest.' Philoctete, his trouser-legs rolled, stares out to sea from the worn rumshop window. The itch in the sore tingles like the tendrils of the anemone, and the puffed blister of Portuguese man-o'-war.? jellyfish
10 He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles of his grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure? That the cross he carried was not only the anchor's
but that of his race, for a village black and poor as the pigs that rooted in its burning garbage, 15 then were hooked on the anchors of the abattoir.0 slaughterhouse
Ma Kilman was sewing. She looked up and saw his face squinting from the white of the street. He was waiting to pass out on the table. This went on for days.
The ice turned to warm water near the self-hating 20 gesture of clenching his head tight in both hands. She heard the boys in blue uniforms, going to school,
screaming at his elbow: 'Pheeloh! Pheelosophee!' A mummy embalmed in Vaseline and alcohol. In the Egyptian silence she muttered softly:
1. Modern Greek version of the name Homer. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey are, along with Dante's Divine Comedy, from which Walcott adapts the terza rima stanza, and James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), major influences on this Caribbean epic, which moves across centuries and geographies, from Saint Lucia to Africa to Ireland. 2. Pronounced fee-loek-TET; a name shared with Philoctetes, who, in the Iliad and Sophocles' eponymous play, is abandoned on an island on the way to the Trojan War after receiving a snakebite. The wound never heals and
