Poem of the Week: an extract from White Egrets by Derek Walcott.

Our Poem of the Week is an extract from White Egrets by Derek Walcott.

VI

I hadn’t seen them for half of the Christmas week,
the egrets, and no one told me why they had gone,
but they are back with the rain now, orange beak,
pink shanks and stabbing head, back on the lawn
where they used to be in the clear, limitless rain
of the Santa Cruz Valley, which, when it rains, falls
steadily against the cedars till it mists the plain.
The egrets are the colour of waterfalls,
and of clouds. Some friends, the few I have left,
are dying, but the egrets stalk through the rain
as if nothing mortal can affect them, or they lift
like abrupt angels, sail, then settle again.
Sometimes the hills themselves disappear
like friends, slowly, but I am happier
that they have come back now, like memory, like prayer.

Copyright © The Estate of Derek Walcott, 2010. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. All rights reserved.

This extract can be found in White Egrets by Derek Walcott.