All Poems
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The Killing Place
© Edgar Albert Guest
Were hiking along at a two-forty pace
We 're making life seem like a man-killing race,
With our nerves all on edge and our jaws firmly set
We go rushing along; with our brows lined with sweat
And our cheeks pale and drawn every minute we dash,
And the goal that we 're after is merely more cash.
Koening Of The River
© Derek Walcott
Koening knew now there was no one on the river.
Entering its brown mouth choking with lilies
and curtained with midges, Koenig poled the shallop
past the abandoned ferry and the ferry piles
At The Abbey Theatre
© William Butler Yeats
DEAR Craoibhin Aoibhin, look into our case.
When we are high and airy hundreds say
Parang
© Derek Walcott
The falling of a fixed star.
Yound men does bring love to disgrace
With remorseful, regretful words,
When flesh upon flesh was the tune
Since the first cloud raise up to disclose
The breast of the naked moon.
The Saddhu Of Couva
© Derek Walcott
When sunset, a brass gong,
vibrate through Couva,
is then I see my soul, swiftly unsheathed,
like a white cattle bird growing more small
Egypt, Tobago
© Derek Walcott
There is a shattered palm
on this fierce shore,
its plumes the rusting helm-
et of a dead warrior.
"Sometimes I watch you, mark your brooding eyes"
© Lesbia Harford
Sometimes I watch you, mark your brooding eyes,
Your grave brow over-weighted with deep thought,
Your mouth's straight line details of such a sort
That all aloofness in your aspect lies.
Coral
© Derek Walcott
This coral's hape ecohes the hand
It hollowed. ItsImmediate 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,
On Happienesse
© Thomas Chatterton
MAIE Selynesse on erthes boundes bee hadde?
Maie yt adyghte yn human shape bee founde?
Codicil
© Derek Walcott
Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,
The Titmouse
© Walter de la Mare
If you would happy company win,
Dangle a palm-nut from a tree,
Idly in green to sway and spin,
Its snow-pulped kernel for bait; and see,
A nimble titmouse enter in.
Pentecost
© Derek Walcott
Better a jungle in the head
than rootless concrete.
Better to stand bewildered
by the fireflies' crooked street;
Thought
© Washington Allston
What master-voice shall from the dim profound
Of Thought evoke its fearful, mighty Powers?-
Forest Of Europe
© Derek Walcott
The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.
In The Dark
© Mary Thacher Higginson
THE fields were silent, and the woodland drear,
The moon had set, and clouds hid all the stars;
And blindly, when a footfall met my ear,
I reached across the bars.
The Star-Apple Kingdom
© Derek Walcott
There were still shards of an ancient pastoral
in those shires of the island where the cattle drank
their pools of shadow from an older sky,
surviving from when the landscape copied such objects as
Dark August
© Derek Walcott
So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won't come out.
