POEMS
Derek Walcott
OMEROS'
Seven Seas rose in the half-dark to make coffee.
Sunrise was heating the ring of the horizon
and clouds were warming like loaves. By the heat of the
glowing iron rose he slid the saucepan's base on-
to the ring and anchored it there. The saucepan shook
from the weight ofwater in it, then it settled.
His kettle leaked. He groped for the tin chair and took
his place near the saucepan to hear when it bubbled.
It would boil but not scream like a bosun's whistle
to let him know it was ready. He heard the dog's
morning whine under the boards of the house, its
tail
thudding to
be
let in, but he envied the pirogues
already miles out at sea. Then he heard the first breeze
washing the sea-almond's plates; last night there had been
a full moon white as his eyes. He saw with his ears.
He imagined roofs as the sun began to climb.
Since the disease had obliterated vision,
when the sunset shook the sea's hand for the last time -
and an inward darkness grew where the moon and sun
indistinctly altered, he moved by a sixth sense,
like a clock without an hour or second hand,
wiped clean as the plate that he now began to rinse
while the saucepan bubbled; blindness was not the end.
It
was not a palm-tree's dial on the noon sand.
*
A selection from
Omeros
by Derek Walcott to be published by Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux.
Copyright
©
1990 by Derek Walcott. All rights reserved .
