English, Derek Walcott, Poetry, Languages

Winding Up by Derek Walcott

By T.

18 August 2011

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Winding Up
Derek Walcott

I live on the water,
alone. Without wife and children,
I have circled every possibility
to come to this:

a low house by grey water,
with windows always open
to the stale sea. We do not choose such things,

but we are what we have made.
We suffer, the years pass,
we shed freight but not our need

for encumbrances. Love is a stone
that settled on the sea-bed
under grey water. Now, I require nothing

from poetry but true feeling,
no pity, no fame, no healing. Silent wife,
we can sit watching grey water,

and in a life awash
with mediocrity and trash
live rock-like.

I shall unlearn feeling,
unlearn my gift. That is greater
and harder than what passes there for life.

MARGINALIA

One of the things I promised myself was to live by the sea. Someday.

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This poem appeared in Collected Poems 1948-1984 by Derek Walcott, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)

ABOUT DEREK WALCOTT

Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. He published his first poem in the local newspaper at the age of 14. Five years later, he borrowed $200 to print his first collection, 25 Poems, which he distributed on street corners. Walcott’s major breakthrough came with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), a book which celebrates the… (more)