Midsummer

by Derek Walcott

  It touches earth, that branched diviner’s rod 1

  Midsummer stretches beside me with its cat’s yawn 1

  Mist soaps the motel room’s window vigorously 1

  Mud. Clods. The sucking heel of the rain-flinger 1

  My double, tired of morning, closes the door 1

  No subtle fugues between black day, black night 1

  Noon empties balconies, but the arched eyebrows 1

  On the quays of Papeete, the dawdling white-ducked colonists 1

  Our houses are one step from the gutter. Plastic curtains 1

  Pale khaki fields of dehydrated grass 1

  Perhaps if I’d nurtured some divine disease 1

  Raw ocher sea cliffs in the slanting afternoon 1

  Rest, Christ! from tireless war. See, it’s midsummer 1

  Since all of your work was really an effort to appease 1

  So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered 1

  Something primal in our spine makes the child swing 1

  Thalassa! Thalassa! The thud of that echoing blue 1

  The amber spray of trees feather-brushed with the dusk 1

  The camps hold their distance—brown chestnuts and gray smoke 1

  The gray English road hissed emptily under the tires 1

  The hemispheres lie sweating, flesh to flesh 1

  The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud— 1

  The midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that made me 1

  The oak inns creak in their joints as light declines 1

  The sirens will keep on singing, they will never break 1

  The sun has fired my face to terra-cotta 1

  The sun is wholly up now; things are white or green 1

  There was one Syrian, with his bicycle, in our town 1

  This Spanish port, piratical in diverseness 1

  Those grooves in that forehead of sand-colored flesh 1

  To betray philosophy is the gentle treason 1

  Today I respect structure, the antithesis of conceit 1

  What broke the green lianas’ ropes? Scaled armor 1

  What’s missing from the Charles is the smell of salt 1

  “Wherever a thought can go back seventy years 1

  With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin 1

  With the stampeding hiss and scurry of green lemmings 1

  You’ve forgotten the heat. It could burn from a zinc fence 1

  About the Author

  Derek Walcott was born in St Lucia, in the West Indies, in 1930. The author of many plays and books of poetry, he was awarded the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. He now divides his time between homes in St Lucia and New York.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition published in 2011

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 by Derek Walcott

  The right of Derek Walcott to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Acknowledgements are made to The Agni Review,

  Bostonia Magazine, Embers, The Harvard Advocate,

  The Nation, The New York Review of Books,

  The New York Times Magazine, The Pacific Quarterly Moana,

  Persea, and Trinidad and Tobago Review,

  where some of these poems originally appeared.

  “Tropic Zone” (XLIII), XXVIII (as “Midsummer”),

  and XXXIX (as “The Hare”)

  appeared originally in The New Yorker

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26466–7