Keshorn Walcott Quotes

The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself. ~ Derek Walcott

To change your language you must change your life. ~ Derek Walcott

A Far Cry From Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool ~ Derek Walcott

In the Village

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

The 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. ~ Derek Walcott

To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the guilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted back yards, under their dusty trees, or climbing into their favelas, were all natural scene designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made lyrical, and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into virtue. In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theater is as vivid, voluble, and cheap. ~ Derek Walcott

Nature has a habit of placing some of her most attractive treasures in places where it is difficult to locate and obtain them. ~ Charles Doolittle Walcott

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent. ~ Derek Walcott

[On Love After Love by Derek Walcott]
I read this poem often, once a month at least. In the madness and mayhem of modern life, where every man seems committed to an endless search for the approval and esteem of his fellows and peers, no matter what the cost, this poem reminds me of a basic truth: that we are, as we are, "enough". Most of us are motivated deep down by a sense of insufficiency, a need to be better stronger, faster; to work harder; to be more committed, more kind, more self-sufficient, more successful. But this short poem by Derek Walcott is like a declaration of unconditional love. It's like the embrace of an old friend. He brings us to an awareness of the present moment, calm and peaceful, and to a feeling of gratitude for everything we have. I have read it to my dearest friends after dinner once, and to my family at Christmas, and they started crying, which always, unfailingly, makes me cry. ~ Tom Hiddleston

and the frayed earth, crisscrossed like old bagasse, spring to a cushiony quilt of emerald grass, and who does sew and sow and patch the land? ~ Derek Walcott

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars. ~ Derek Walcott

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and sub ~ Derek Walcott

She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf. ~ Derek Walcott

Time is the metre, memory the only plot. ~ Derek Walcott

I was a Liverpool fan simply because my dad followed them. Unfortunately I wasn't born when the team had their golden era, but I enjoyed watching the likes of Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler and Steve McManaman when I was growing up. When Liverpool won the Champions League last year, I went mad. I was shouting so loud I think I woke up the entire village where I live! ~ Theo Walcott

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. And the better the world liked seeing them fall. ~ Loretta Chase

I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea. ~ Derek Walcott

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves ... ~ Derek Walcott

I've been consistent in patches this season. ~ Theo Walcott

Love After Love The 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. ~ Derek Walcott

Who is the man who can speak to the strong?
Where is the fool who can talk to the wise?
Men who are dead now have learnt this long,
Bitter is wisdom that fails when it tries. ~ Derek Walcott

Who with the Devil tries to play fair,
weaves the net of his own despair.
Oh, smile; what's a house between drunkards? ~ Derek Walcott

what I preferred
was not statues but the bird in the statue's hair. ~ Derek Walcott

Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind. ~ Derek Walcott

I'm fond of Derek Walcott too. I could eat his poem "Love After Love." Just peel the words off the page and stuff them in my mouth. ~ Cath Crowley

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven. ~ Derek Walcott

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past. ~ Derek Walcott

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god. ~ Derek Walcott

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. ~ Derek Walcott

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. ~ Derek Walcott

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. ~ Derek Walcott

Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire
poesia Metamorfosi, I. Luna ~ Derek Walcott

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average. ~ Derek Walcott

I shall unlearn feeling,
unlearn my gift. That is greater
and harder than what passes there for life. ~ Derek Walcott

I read; I travel; I become ~ Derek Walcott

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, ~ Derek Walcott

Let them run ahead. Then I'll have good reason for shooting them down. Sharpeville? Attempting to escape. Attempting to escape from the prison of their lives. That's the most dangerous crime. It brings about revolution. So, off we go, lads! ~ Derek Walcott

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history. ~ Derek Walcott

I liked that title. I didn't want to lose it to anybody, but if I had to lose it, I'm glad I lost it to you. You're a good fighter and gonna be a great champ. ~ Jersey Joe Walcott

I'm showing the boss what I can do. I was bought as a striker and I always believe I am a striker. ~ Theo Walcott