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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.

Derek Walcott

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Derek Walcott
Age: 87 †
Born: 1930
Born: January 23
Died: 2017
Died: March 17
Author
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
Derek Alton Walcott
Sir Derek Alton Walcott
Poems
Sense
Make
Good

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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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You can't write drunk.
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The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
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We read, we travel, we become.
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Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
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I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
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Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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For every poet it is always morning in the world history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
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The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
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The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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