Derek Walcott: poem and prayer

• Pentecost
• Better a jungle in the head
• than rootless concrete.
• Better to stand bewildered
• by the fireflies’ crooked street;

• winter lamps do not show
• where the sidewalk is lost,
• nor can these tongues of snow
• speak for the Holy Ghost;

• the self-increasing silence 
• of words dropped from a roof
• points along iron railings,
• direction, in not proof.

• But best is this night surf
• with slow scriptures of sand,
• that sends, not quite a seraph,
• but a late cormorant,

• whose fading cry propels
• through phosphorescent shoal
• what, in my childhood gospels,
• used to be called the Soul.

• Love After Love
• The time will come 
• when, with elation 
• you will greet yourself arriving 
• at your own door, in your own mirror 
• and each will smile at the other’s welcome, 

• and say, sit here. Eat. 
• You will love again the stranger who was your self.
• Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 
• to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

• all your life, whom you ignored 
• for another, who knows you by heart. 
• Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

• the photographs, the desperate notes, 
• peel your own image from the mirror. 
• Sit. Feast on your life.

• Coral
• This coral’s shape echoes 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 stone
• Set 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

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was a poet from St. Lucia who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. His work, colored with his native Caribbean island and infused with a Christian spirituality. “I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer,” he once wrote. “I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.” The themes in his poetry run the gamut from love to elegy, celebrating life in all its natural a supernatural fullness. Walcott’s poems are marked by a precise and elaborate use of metaphor and other figures of speech.