A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
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.
I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don’t work, I study the stars.
In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Love After Love all your life, whom you have 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.
The classics can console. But not enough.
We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.
The English language is nobody’s special property.
I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there’d be no rest, there’d be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.
Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
She’s a rare vase, out of a cat’s reach, on its shelf.
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.
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!
For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when Arrived at its anchor of suffering, a grave Or a bed, despairing in action, we ask O God, where is our home?
You want to hear my history? Ask the sea.
Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.
I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate, not because they are innocent, but because they are true.