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Yo vivo solo
al borde del agua sin esposa ni hijos.
He girado en torno a muchas posibilidades
para llegar a lo siguiente:

una pequeña casa a la orilla de un agua gris,
con las ventanas siempre abiertas
hacia el mar añejo. No elegimos estas cosas.

Mas somos lo que hemos hecho.
Sufrimos, los años pasan,
dejamos caer el peso pero no nuestra necesidad

de cargar con algo. El amor es una piedra
que se asentó en el fondo del mar
bajo el agua gris. Ahora, ya no le pido nada a

la poesía sino buenos sentimientos,
ni misericordia, ni fama, ni Curación. Mujer silenciosa,
podemos sentarnos a mirar las aguas grises,

y en una vida inmaculada
por la mediocridad y la basura
vivir al modo de las rocas.

Voy a olvidar la sensibilidad,
olvidaré mi talento. Eso será más grande
y más difícil que lo que pasa por ser la vida.

Derek Walcott

Winding Up

I live on the water,
alone. Without wife and children,
I have circled every possibility
to come to this:

a low house by grey water,
with windows always open
to the stale sea. We do not choose such things,

but we are what we have made.
We suffer, the years pass,
we shed freight but not our need

for encumbrances. Love is a stone
that settled on the sea-bed
under grey water. Now, I require nothing

from poetry but true feeling,
no pity, no fame, no healing. Silent wife,
we can sit watching grey water,

and in a life awash
with mediocrity and trash
live rock-like.

I shall unlearn feeling,
unlearn my gift. That is greater
and harder than what passes there for 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 civilizations 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?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

Derek Walcott

The Season Of Phantasmal Peace

Then all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill—
the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
                                                    it was the light
that you will see at evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought into the raven's cawing,
the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals of falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

Derek 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

El Amor Después Del Amor

El tiempo vendrá
cuando, con gran alegría,
tú saludarás al tú mismo que llega
a tu puerta, en tu espejo,
y cada uno sonreirá a la bienvenida del otro,
y dirá, siéntate aquí. Come.
Seguirás amando al extraño que fue tú mismo.
Ofrece vino. Ofrece pan. Devuelve tu amor
a ti mismo, al extraño que te amó
toda tu vida, a quien no has conocido
para conocer a otro corazón,
que te conoce de memoria.
Recoge las cartas del escritorio,
las fotografías, las desesperadas líneas,
despega tu imagen del espejo.
Siéntate. Celebra tu vida.

Derek Walcott