from The Prodigal: 12

Prodigal, what were your wanderings about?

The smoke of homecoming, the smoke of departure.

The earth grew music and the tubers sprouted

to Sesenne's singing, rain-water, fresh patois

in a clay carafe, a clear spring in the ferns,

and pure things took root like the sweet-potato vine.

Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew,

as the sun turns into a cipher from a green flash,

clouds crumble like cities, the embers of Carthage;

any man without a history stands in nettles

and no butterflies console him, like surrendering flags,

does he, still a child, long for battles and castles

from the books of his beginning, in a hieratic language

he will never inherit, but one in which he writes

"Over the sea at dusk, an arrowing curlew,"

his whole life a language awaiting translation?

Since I am what I am, how was I made?

To ascribe complexion to the intellect

is not an insult, since it takes its plaid

like the invaluable lizard from its background,

and if our work is piebald mimicry

then virtue lies in its variety

to be adept. On the warm stones of Florence

I subtly alter to a Florentine

till the sun passes, in London

I am pieced by fog, and shaken from reflection

in Venice, a printed page in the sun

on which a cabbage-white unfolds, a bookmark.

To break through veils like spiders' webs,

crack carapaces like a day-moth and achieve

a clarified frenzy and feel the blood settle

like a brown afternoon stream in River Doree

is what I pulsed for in my brain and wrist

for the drifting benediction of a drizzle

drying on this page like asphalt, for peace that passes

like a changing cloud, to a hawk's slow pivot.

In the vale of Santa Cruz I look to the hills.

The white flowers have the fury of battle,

they lay siege to the mountains, for war

there is the tumult of the white ravines,

and the cascade's assault; they bow their plumes,

Queen Anne's lace, bougainvillea, orchid and oleander,

and they are as white as arrested avalanches,

angry and Alpine, their petals blur into

a white gust from the Matterhom or the streets of Zermatt.

Both worlds are welded, they were seamed by delight.

Santa Cruz, in spring. Deep hills with blue clefts.

I have come back for the white egrets

feeding in a flock on the lawn, darting their bills

in that finical stride, gawkily elegant,

then suddenly but leisurely sailing

to settle, but not too far off, like angels.

III

I wake at sunrise to angelic screams.

And time is measuring my grandchildren's cries

and time outpaces the sepia water

of the racing creek, time takes its leisure, cunning

in the blocked hollows of the pool, the elephantine stones

in the leaf-marked lagoon, time sails

with the soundless buzzard over the smoking hills

and the clouds that fray and change

and time waits very quiet between the mountains

and the brown tracks in the valleys of the Northern Range,

a cover of overhanging bamboo, in Maraval

where, if the bed were steeper, a brown stream races

or tries to, pooling in rocks, with great avail

for me at least, or where a range's blues

and indigo over which wide hawks sail

their shadows on the wells of Santa Cruz,

dark benedictions on the brook's muttering shale,

and the horses are slowly plunging their manes

as they climb up from the paved-with-lilies pond,

so much mythology in their unharnessed necks!

These little things take root as I add my praise

to the huge lawn at the back of the house, a field,

a bright, unaltered meadow, a small savannah

for cries and bicycles and joy-crazed dogs

bolting after pedalling boys, the crescent ghost

of the new moon showing and on the thick slopes

this forest like green billowing smoke

pierced by the flame petals of the immortelle.

Petals of the flame tree against ice-cream walls

and the arches across the park with its tacit fountain,

the old idlers on the benches, this is the prose

that spreads like the shade of an immortal banyan

in front of the library, the bulk that darkens

the violin of twilight when traffic has vanished

and nearly over also the colonial regime when the wharves

cradled the rocking schooners of our boyhood to

the echo of vespers in the alien cathedral.

In the hot green silence a dragonfly's drone

crossing the scorched hill to the shade of the cedars

and spiced laurels, the lauriers canelles,

the word itself lifting the plurals of its leaves,

from the hot ground, from this page, the singeing smells.

How simple to write this after you have gone,

that your death that afternoon had the same ease

as stopping at the side of the road under the trees

to buy cassava bread that comes in two sorts

sweet and unsweetened, from the huge cauldron,

on the road between Soufrière and Canaries.

The heat collects in the depths between the ridges

and the high hawks circle in the gathering haze;

like consonants round a vowel, insistent midges

hum round noun's hexagon, and the hornet's house.

Delve in the hot, still valley of Soufrière,

the black, baking asphalt and its hedges dripping shade

and here is the ultimate nullity despite the moil

of the churning vegetation. The small church

hidden in leaves. In mid-afternoon, the halt–

then dart of a quizzical lizard across the road.

Copyright Credit: Derek Walcott, "12" from The Prodigal. Copyright © 2004 by Derek Walcott. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

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Source: The Prodigal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004)