Derek Walcott

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin! When I press summer dusks together, it is a month of street accordions and sprinklers laying the dust, small shadows running from me. It is music opening and closing,Italia mia, on Bleecker, ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper; it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water down littered streets that lead you to no water, and gathering islands and lemons in the mind. There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame. I would undress you in the summer heat, and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers. Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands, daggers of agave bristle in primordial defense, like a cornered monster backed up against the sea. A mongoose charges dry grass and fades through a fence faster than an afterthought. Dust rises easily. Haze of the Harmattan, Sahara dust, memory’s haze from the dried well of Africa, the headland’s desert or riders in swirling burnooses, mixed with the greys of hills veiled in Impressionist light. We inherit two worlds of associations, or references, drought that we heighten into Delacroix’s North Africa, veils, daggers, lances, herds the Harmattan brought with a phantom inheritance, which the desperate seeker of a well-spring staggers in the heat in search of— heroic ancestors; the other that the dry season brings is the gust of a European calendar, but it is the one love that thirsts for confirmations in the circling rings of the ground dove’s cooing on stones, in the acacia’s thorns and the agave’s daggers, that they are all ours, the white horsemen of the Sahara, India’s and Asia’s plumed mongoose and crested palmtree, Benin and Pontoise. We are history’s afterthought, as the mongoose races ahead of its time; in drought we discover our shadows, our origins that range from the most disparate places, from the dugouts of Guinea to the Nile’s canted dhows. II The incredible blue with its bird-inviting cloud, in which there are crumbling towers, banners and domes, and the sliding Carthage of sunsets, the marble shroud drawn over associations that are Greece’s and Rome’s and rarely of Africa. They continue at sixty-seven to echo in the corridors of the head, perspectives of a corridor in the Vatican that led, not to heaven, but to more paintings of heaven, ideas in lifted sieves drained by satiety because great art can exhaust us, and even the steadiest faith can be clogged by excess, the self-assured Christs, the Madonnas’ inflexible postures without the mess of motherhood. With this blue I bless emptiness where these hills are barren of tributes and the repetitions of power, our sky’s naive ceiling without domes and spires, an earth whose roots like the thorned acacia’s deepen my belief.