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Tag: Omeros

The Gulf Stream, another Homer’s Hand

  “Art is immortal and weighs heavily on us, and museums leave us at a loss for words. Outside becomes a museum: its ornate frames square off a dome, a few trees, a brace of sparrows; till every view is a postcard signed by great names:...

They cried for a broken gourd

Yet they felt the sea-wind tying them into one nation of eyes and shadows and groans, in the one pain that is inconsolable, the loss of one’s shore with its crooked footpath. They had wept, not for their wives only, their fading children, but...

Angelus Ashes

“. . . Every noon, a carillon sprinkled its yellow petals above a morose banyan. The Church of Immaculate Conception was numbering the Angelus. With lace frills on, balconies stood upright, as did the false pillars of the Georgian library;...

The Parentheses of Palms

“Kneel to your load, then balance your staggering feet and walk up that coal ladder as they do in time, one bare foot after the next in ancestral rhyme. Because Rhyme remains the parentheses of palms shielding a candle’s tongue, it is...

Battle of the Saints

The galleon’s shadow

I In the islet’s museum there is a twisted wine bottle, crusted with fool’s gold from the iron- cold depth below the redoubt. It has been listed variously by experts: one, that a galleon blown by a hurricane out of Cartagena, this far...

The conch shell’s invocation

Two brief selections today that caught my eye. I’m mesmerized at how Walcott plays with words and images, dances between his native Caribbean and Homer’s epic world. It’s almost as if his poem is a palimpsest written on top of...

To roof the sea

A little more from Book I of Derek Walcott’s Omeros. I just love this description of the trees that thirst to become canoes and the way they almost are ships even before they are shaped. It’s so very joyful, so full of life, and the...

Omeros

“This is how, one sunrise, we cut down them canoes.” Philoctete smiles for the tourists, who try taking his soul with their cameras. “Once wind bring the news to the laurier-cannelles, their leaves start shaking the minute the axe...

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