Photo: "Reencounter" by me
Poem: Excerpt from Omeros by Derek Walcott
Book One: Chapter XIII: III
"Along this coal-blackened wharf, what Time decided
to do with my treacherous body after this,"
he said, watching the women, "will stay in your head
as long as a question you have no right to ask,
only to doubt, not hate our infuriating
silence. I am only the shadow of that task
as much as their work, your pose of a question waiting,
as you crouch with a writing lamp over a desk,
remains in the darkness after the light has gone,
and whether night is palpable between dawn and dusk
is not for the living; so you mind your business,
which is life and work, like theirs, but I will say this:
O Thou, my Zero, is an impossible prayer,
utter extinction is still a doubtful conceit.
Though we pray to nothing, nothing cannot be there.
Kneel to your load, then balance your staggering feet
and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time,
one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme.
Because Rhyme remains the parentheses of palms
shielding a candle's tongue, it is the language's
desire to enclose the loved world in tis arms;
or heft a coal-basket; only by its stages
like those groaning women will you achieve that height
whose wooden planks in couplets lift your pages
higher than those hills of infernal anthracite.
There, like ants or angels, they see their native town,
unknown, raw, insignificant. They walk, you write;
keep to that narrow causeway without looking down,
climbing in their footsteps, that slow ancestral beat
of those used to climbing roads; your own work owes them
because the couplet of those multiplying feet
made your first rhymes. Look, they climb, and no one knows them;
they take their copper pittances, and your duty
from the time you watched them from your grandmother's house
as a child wounded by their power and beauty
is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice."
We stood in the hot afternoon. My father took
his fob-watch from its pocket, replaced it, then said,
lightly gripping my arm,
"He enjoys a good talk,
a serious trim, and I myself look ahead
to our appointment." He kissed me. I watched him walk
through a pillared balcony's alternating shade.
Poem: Excerpt from Omeros by Derek Walcott
Book One: Chapter XIII: III
"Along this coal-blackened wharf, what Time decided
to do with my treacherous body after this,"
he said, watching the women, "will stay in your head
as long as a question you have no right to ask,
only to doubt, not hate our infuriating
silence. I am only the shadow of that task
as much as their work, your pose of a question waiting,
as you crouch with a writing lamp over a desk,
remains in the darkness after the light has gone,
and whether night is palpable between dawn and dusk
is not for the living; so you mind your business,
which is life and work, like theirs, but I will say this:
O Thou, my Zero, is an impossible prayer,
utter extinction is still a doubtful conceit.
Though we pray to nothing, nothing cannot be there.
Kneel to your load, then balance your staggering feet
and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time,
one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme.
Because Rhyme remains the parentheses of palms
shielding a candle's tongue, it is the language's
desire to enclose the loved world in tis arms;
or heft a coal-basket; only by its stages
like those groaning women will you achieve that height
whose wooden planks in couplets lift your pages
higher than those hills of infernal anthracite.
There, like ants or angels, they see their native town,
unknown, raw, insignificant. They walk, you write;
keep to that narrow causeway without looking down,
climbing in their footsteps, that slow ancestral beat
of those used to climbing roads; your own work owes them
because the couplet of those multiplying feet
made your first rhymes. Look, they climb, and no one knows them;
they take their copper pittances, and your duty
from the time you watched them from your grandmother's house
as a child wounded by their power and beauty
is the chance you now have, to give those feet a voice."
We stood in the hot afternoon. My father took
his fob-watch from its pocket, replaced it, then said,
lightly gripping my arm,
"He enjoys a good talk,
a serious trim, and I myself look ahead
to our appointment." He kissed me. I watched him walk
through a pillared balcony's alternating shade.
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| Reencounter |
