Derek Walcott Quotes

"Bleecker Street, Summer"

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
for the eternal idleness of the imagined return,
for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom
of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!

When I press summer dusks together, it is
a month of street accordions and sprinklers
laying the dust, small shadows running from me.

It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,
ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children
tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;
it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water
down littered streets that lead you to no water,
and gathering islands and lemons in the mind.

There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame.
I would undress you in the summer heat,
and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

Who is the man who can speak to the strong?
Where is the fool who can talk to the wise?
Men who are dead now have learnt this long,
Bitter is wisdom that fails when it tries.

No masterpieces in huge frames to worship, … and yet there are the days when every street corner rounds itself into a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase, canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue, the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise.

Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand when the sunrise brightens the river's memory <p> and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound. Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed <p> an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens over its lost name, when the hunched island was called 'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' <p> But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned, its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail <p> moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries, that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race <p> unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees. These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space for a single God where the old gods stood before, <p> The first god was a gommier. The generator began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw, sent the chips flying like mackrel over water <p> into trembling weeds

Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don't work, I study the stars.

I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.

The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.

I never thought I would see the day when America (which is based on the idea of liberty, from which the world Liberal comes) would become so self-centered and hypocritical. I mean if democracy considers liberal to be a term of abuse, then we should be terrified. A liberal is someone who believes in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be fascist.

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.

is the same voices that, in the slave ship, smile at their brothers, “Boy, is just the whip,

History was fact,
History was a cannon, not a lizard; De Grasse

leaving Martinique, and Rodney crouching to act
in the right wind. Iounalo, my royal arse!
Hewanorra, my hole! Was the greatest battle

in naval history, which put the French to rout,
fought for a creature with a disposable tail
and elbows like a goalie?

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.

I am the man my father loved and was.