Home > Work > Collected Poems, 1948-1984
1 " The fist clenched round my heartloosens a little, and I gaspbrightness; but it tightensagain. When have I ever not lovedthe pain of love? But this has movedpast love to mania. This has the strong clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of unreason, before plunging howling into the abyss.Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live. "
― Derek Walcott , Collected Poems, 1948-1984
2 " Love After LoveThe 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. "
3 " Today is Thursday, Vallejo is dying,but come, girl, get your raincoat, let's look for lifein some cafe behind tear-streaked windows,perhaps the fin de siecle isn't really finished,maybe there's a piano playing it somewhere "
4 " 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 bedroomof tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin!When I press summer dusks together, it isa month of street accordions and sprinklerslaying the dust, small shadows running from me.It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker,ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of childrentearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper;it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of waterdown 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. "