Derek Walcott — The Day with all its Pain Ahead is Yours

The day, with all its pain ahead, is yours. The ceaseless creasing of the morning sea(1), the fluttering gamboge cedar(2) leaves allegro, the rods of the yawning branches trolling in the breeze, the rusted meadows, the wind-whitened grass, the coos of the stone-colored ground doves on the road, the echo of benediction(3) on a house— its rooms of pain, its verandah of remorse when joy lanced through its open-hearted doors like a hummingbird(4) out to the garden and the pool in which the sky has fallen. These are all yours, and pain has made them brighter as absence does after a death(5), as the light heals the grass. And the twig-brown lizard scuttles up its branch like fingers on the struts of a guitar. I hear the detonations of agave the stuttering outbursts of bougainvillea(6), I see the acacia’s bonfire, the begonia’s bayonets, and the tamarind’s thorns and the broadsides of clouds from the calabash and the cedars fluttering their white flags of surrender and the flame trees’ siege of the fort(7). I saw black bulls, horns lowered, galloping, goring the mist that rose, unshrouding the hillocks of Santa Cruz(8) and the olives of Esperanza(8) Andalusian idyll(8), and answer and the moon’s blank tambourine and the drizzle’s guitars and the sunlit wires of the rain the shawls and the used stars and the ruined fountains. — SOURCE: Poetry Foundation (2004)