Derek Walcott Quotes

I do not live in you, I bear
my house inside me, everywhere

until your winters grow more kind
by the dancing firelight of mind

where knobs of brass do not exist
whose doors dissolve in tenderness

House that lets in, at last, those fears
that are its guests, to sit on chairs

feasts on their human faces, and
takes pity simply by the hand

shows her her room, and feels the hum
of wood and brick becoming home.

I read, I travel, I become

As human beings we’ve certainly suffered the loss of awe, the loss of sacredness, and the loss of the fact that we’re not here — we’re not put on earth — to shape it anyway we want...
You want something to happen with poetry, but it doesn’t make anything happen. So then somebody says, “What’s the use of poetry?” Then you say, “Well, what’s the use of a cloud? What’s the use of a river? What’s the use of a tree?” They don’t make anything happen.

For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when Arrived at its anchor of suffering, a grave Or a bed, despairing in action, we ask O God, where is our home?

Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.

Who with the Devil tries to play fair,
weaves the net of his own despair.
Oh, smile; what’s a house between drunkards?

In the Village

III

Who has removed the typewriter from my desk,
so that I am a musician without his piano
with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque
as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so
full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.
The notes outside are visible; sparrows will
line antennae like staves, the way springs were,
but the roofs are cold and the great grey river
where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,
moves imperceptibly like the accumulating
years. I have no reason to forgive her
for what I brought on myself. I am past hating,
past the longing for Italy where blowing snow
absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range
outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting
for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning
of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange
without the rusty music of my machine. No words
for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange
of old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.

The future happens, no matter how much we scream.

Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy's shore.

Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator;
he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys
in every odyssey, one on worried water,

the other crouched and motionless, without noise.
For both, the 'I' is a mast; a desk is a raft
for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak

of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft
carries the other to cities where people speak
a different language, or look at him differently,

while the sun rises from the other direction
with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey
is motionless; as the sea moves round an island

that appears to be moving, Jove moves round the heart
with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand
knows it returns to the port from which it must start.

Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you,
why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you:
to circle yourself and your island with this art.

You want to hear my history? Ask the sea.

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.

Why couldn't they love the place, same way, together,
the way he always loved her, even with his sore?
Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather,

in sickness and in health, its beauty in being poor?
The way the leaves loved her, not like a pink leaflet
printed with slogans of black people fighting war?

These are the days when, however simple the future, we do not go
towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators
divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show

exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish woman
is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window
whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate, not because they are innocent, but because they are true

Let them run ahead. Then I’ll have good reason for shooting them down. Sharpeville? Attempting to escape. Attempting to escape from the prison of their lives. That’s the most dangerous crime. It brings about revolution. So, off we go, lads!