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.
I read; I travel; I become.
The English language is nobody’s special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.
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.
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
To change your language you must change your life.
I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one’s biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
What are men? Children who doubt.
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.