Poem of the Week: ‘My climate now is the marsh’ by Derek Walcott

Our Poem of the Week is an extract from White Egrets by Derek Walcott, ‘My climate now is the marsh’.

In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects – the Caribbean’s complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucia, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccommodating sublime of the new world, time’s cunning passages and the poet’s place in all of this – with passionate intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the systolic and mesmerising repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott carries his surf-like cadence from poem to poem and from sequence to sequence in this celebratory and close-knit collection.

My climate now is the marsh

My climate now is the marsh, the leaden
silver water that secretes in reeds
or moves with a monody that happily might deaden
endeavour and envy and the waste of noble deeds
for reputation’s sake, my frenzy is in stasis,
like a shallop with a staved-in hull.
I fly like the slate heron to desolate places,
to the ribbed wreck that moss makes beautiful,
where the egret spreads its wings lest it totter
on the aimed prow where crabs scrape for a perch,
all that vigour finished with which I sought a
richer life than this half-hearted search.
I am thinking of a specific site
that is Hunter’s Cove, away from the road
a frog shoots its tongue at the stars
and traffic, of a marsh in marsh-light
with charging dusk and the boom of a toad
in the reeds at the firefly-flecked night
and a heaven improbably swayed in mirroring water.

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.

Read all our poems of the week.