Tuesday Poem: In the Village, Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott

excerpt from 'In The Village' 

White Egrets by Derek Walcott. Copyright © 2010 by Derek Walcott. 

You can read the whole poem here. 

Derek Walcott, who died a few days ago, was one of my favourite poets.  A Nobel prize-winner, like Seamus Heaney, he changed the landscape of poetry for the next generation.  I loved the way he wrote about his homeland, the ocean and about writing poetry - twisting these three strands together until they became one.   

Joseph Brodsky said of him that “For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves, coagulating into an archipelago of poems without which the map of modern literature would effectively match wallpaper. He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.”