Five Poems, Five Days: Part I
Also, unremarkable but pretty Instagram pics of my garden this spring, 'cause, you know, this blog needs some help in the visual department. Day One: XVI by Derek Walcott So what shall we do for the dead, to whose conch-bordered tumuli our lifelong attraction is drawn as to a magnetic empire, whose cities lie ordered with streets and rational avenues, exact as the grid of our vibrating metropolis? In our arrogance, we imagine that they, too, share the immense, inaudible pulse of the clock-shaped earth, slower than ours, maybe, but within our dimension, our simple mathematical formulae. Any peace so indifferent, where all our differences fuse, is an insult to imagine; what use is any labor we accept? They must find our prayers boring, for one prays that they will keep missing us when they have no urge to be ever-remembered, they cannot see what we hoard -- photograph, letter, keepsake, muttered or knitted homily -- as we change flags and h...