 The first poem is by yours truly, entitled Ewanora Return. You cannot leave this country, not again, after having lived in every corner, every hump and hill asymmetrical. Dazzling reflections, shadows, bright, flaring. Pride follows beauty, unrepentant, like a bridal train following amorphous rain clouds in charcoal blackness in rainy season. Arms grasping at other heavings, refusing to weaken, though encumbered by mist rising from river reeds, seduced by a Monday morning smile. The deluge soaks through banana fields that no longer chirp the songs sesson one's song to a flap of zantula wings on dry pitch country roads inland. Forgive the past, but don't let tomorrow steer you away from this place, where nothing is home and home is the core of a bleeding heart. Mountains and rivers come alive in the whispering light on canvas. Church bells peal, Gloria Deus. Long live the people, the land and this light. Next reading is an old poem by Derek Walcott, which first appeared in 25 poems. Been extensively rewritten, but I've chosen the version from the 1962 Jonathan Cape in a Green Night. A far cry from Africa. A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt of Africa. Kikuyu quick as flies batten upon the bloodstream of the veld. Cops is scattered across a paradise. But still the worm, kernel of cryrian cries, waste no compassion on these separate dead. Statistics justify and scholars seize the salience of colonial policy. What is that to a white child hacked in bed? Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break in a white dust of ibises whose cries have wheeled since civilizations dawn. From the parts river to beast-teaming plain, the violence of beast on beast is read as natural law. Yet upright man seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as his worried beast, his wars dance to the titan carcass of a drum, while he calls courage still that native dread of the white piece contracted by the dead. Again, brutish necessity wipes its hands upon the napkin of a dirty cause. Again, a waste of all compassion as with Spain, the gorilla wrestles with the superman. I, who am poisoned with the blood of both, where do I turn to divided to the vain? I, who have cursed this drunken officer of British rule between this Africa and this English tongue, I love how choose I, be treated in both, or give them back what they give. How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? I think most poets like to believe that their most recent work is right up there with their best, so in keeping with that, I'll read one or two things from white egrets. This one may not be my favorite, but it's very interesting. It's the 22nd in the volume. May my enemy be assuaged by these waves because they are beautiful, even to his evil. May the drizzle be a benediction to his heart, even as it is to mine. They say here that the devil is beating his wife when the sun shines through the wires of fine, fine rain. It is not my heart that forgives my enemy his obscene material desires, but the flare of a leaf, the dart of a mottled dove, the processional surpluses of breakers entering the cove as penitents entered the dome to the lace of an altar. Beauty so shaping, neither condemns nor saves, like the tenets of my enemy's church, the basilicas of tumbling cherubs, and agonized saints, and riots of perporeal cloud. Though I have cause, I will share the world's beauty with my enemies, even though their greed destroys the innocence of my Adamic island. My enemy is a serpent as much as he is in a fresco. And he, in all his scales and venom and glittering head, is part of the island's beauty. He need not repent. Was anyone going to read the poem for Obama? I want to, you know, we're saying goodbye to a good president and saying hello to Ove. So, 40 acres, I take it everyone in the room knows what that's about. Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving, a young negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls, an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd dividing like the furrow which a mule has plowed parting for their president, a field of snowflaked cotton 40 acres wide, of crows with predictable omens that the young plowman ignores for his unforgotten cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch are a tense court of bespectacled owls and on the fields receding rim is a gesticulating scarecrow, stamping with rage at him, while the small plow continues on this lined page beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado's black vengeance, and the young plowman feels the change in his veins, heart, muscles, tendons, till the field lies open like a flag as dawn's sure light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower. Okay, I'm going to try to read one very short poem of mine and one that I think will just fit. They're both among the most influenced by Derek, the most in the spirit of Derek that I've been able to do. So, first one, let me get to my content so I don't waste time. Ten, okay. New moon in January. Backlit, the moon starts over. Thin light edges the ash black disc. Crows massed in the crowns of maples hunch asleep against the leaning wind. Each branch remembers one decision. The squat trunk hives its rings in years. Old sun-flooded shard circling airless among the meteors. What do you hope for as earth in its mist-blue swaddling crawls this lap of the zodiac? And I'll close with a 26-line poem in which the first letter of each line goes down the alphabet, it's an acrostic. And the title is Wind Rose, which is a vector chart of the winds plotted against a compass rose. Wind Rose. Air, element we take inside and send back, altered, be lucid. Show us the swift's passage in twilight, the earliest stars. Calm the under voice that yammers, what is the point? To shovel our hair, carry away our hats and umbrellas. Even as you build clouds taller than mountains, favor us with the lightning's power, the fog's invisible cloak. Grant us this breath and another. Grant us tomorrow. Hold us closely lest we fly apart as we would in space. Incline your full weight so that we feel you hold us just as you hold the dew before nightfall, the cloud before rain. Kiss us as we wish a lover to kiss us without forethought or purpose. Light into the treetops, tear the resistant leaves away, measure us who crush them to mulch by our own season. Not as entire emptiness, but emptiness dreaming of form, offer yourself to our senses. Always some trace of odor pervading the wind, wood smoke, magnolia, skunk. Quariless, we cling to absolutes, loosen them, teach us respect for illusion as the oasis in blinding sunlight dissolves on closer approach into waves of heat. Temper our justice with mercy as when violent storms unhasp the doors of the house but forbear to raise it. Veil our desire in cirrus that no one may see its end. Wash earth of its slag, earth's oceans of bilge and oil. X that we cannot solve for, inscribe on the sailor's windrows, yield in your chance distribution of rain. Our sustenance, zealous in nothing but circulation, your gratuitous law. Laissez-moi découver moins, paouillez qu'à fleuille, cachagez en l'eau-tiflée. Foutez ces fleurs à comment pas faire les aides. Ils vont dès qu'à chanter un chanson dans les fouets. À force, chanson est tellement douce et douée. En les fouets, au bord de la rivière, nous cascoutés, nous casbroués toute sa espérance naturelle dilatée. Allô, laissez-nous poser pour un petit moment. Quittez-nous ta dé, timiette, plus longtemps. Pas trois poissées pour lever, pour aller, pour fouquant. Restez en écoute, l'autre mort, l'autre mort. B'a moins d'étiflée qu'à pousser à sous paouillés. B'a moins d'étiflée boigouillée qu'à boujonner de les fouets. Qu'à souler moins qu'à soulager avec la paix. B'a moins la rivière, ou avec une clé. Qu'il sousse de l'oeil, c'est les mônes et mon temps et qu'à pitié rouler. Et à sous bordage, la rivière, les rommiers qu'à poser boire de l'eau, les noix et les hotets. Laissez de l'eau, ça l'a touché l'angle, mais aussi. B'a moins parlé des mots paroles, comme des bijoux cléwantes et pis. Et comme la parole, il cas de rouler à sous l'angle, Laissez moins angéler bordage de l'eau et à sous monne enfin. Laissez moins découver moins. Grosillé. From this village, soaked like a grey rag in salt water, a language came, garnished with conch shells, with a suspicion of berries in its armpits and elbows like flexible oars. Every ceremony commenced in the troughs, in the middens, at the day break and day dark funerals attended by crabs. The orders were fortified by the sea. The anchor of the islands went deep, but was always clear in the sand. Many a shock and often the ray, whose wings are as wide as sails, rose within somniac stare from the wavering corals and a fisherman held up a catfish like a tendrelled head. And the night with its certain inextinguishable candles was like all souls night upside down, the way a bat keeps its own view of the world. So their eyes looked down, amused on us and found we were walking strangely and wondered about our sense of balance, how we slept as if we were dead, how we confused dreams with ordinary things like nails or roses, how rocks aged quickly with moss, the seam-made furrows that had nothing to do with time and the sand started whirlwinds with nothing to do at all. And the shadows answered to the sun alone and sometimes like the top of an old tire, the black rim of a porpoise. El Pino, you who broke your arse drunk, tumbling down the bulkhead and the stairsman who sails like the ray under the breathing waves keep moving. There is nothing here for you. There are different candles and customs here. The dead are different. Different shells guard their graves. There are distinctions beyond the paradise of our horizon. This is not the grape-purple Aegean. There is no wine here, no cheese. The almonds are green, the sea grapes bitter. The language is that of slaves. Thank you. My name is Adriana and I was a student of Derek's in Edmonton, Canada and in St. Lucia. And I am just immensely thrilled to be here to celebrate Derek and what a great professor he was. In Edmonton, we asked Derek whether he would ever write about Edmonton and he said, absolutely not. But this poem proves him wrong. He proved himself wrong. It's called Pond Life and it's from Morning Paramount. White petals detach themselves from the cedar branches to float onto the silent blue kimono of the pool, giving the same answers to every questioning wind, like snow, like Peter Doig's Canadian landscapes. Freckle logs and antler trees advance through a snow scene. How far from palm and breaker was the view from our apartment floor in Edmonton? Two different heritages, yet either one could bring the same excitement with bright air that defined grocery or car park or a beach, that challenged my affection with gray stone and neon signs that stuttered into speech, like the green flash or cedar flowers. Rug and couch all grew synonymous at evening with lights that come on where low headlands crouch. And a pool's ring widens, touched by a bat's wing. So for me, being from Edmonton, I'm very proud of this name drop. And now I will read you one of my poems and it's called Languageless. I should have begun by saying that I lost my mother tongue. I know what you're thinking. How can you lose something that lives inside of you unless you chose to live languageless? Forgive me, loss never occurs on purpose. Think of the way you lose a loved one or a faith. I did not deem Romanian inconvenient. Crumple it up by a trash bin, hoping someone will stumble by, find it useful. Nor did I sweat it away in the labor of learning another language. It disappeared inside myself. Corpul meu, my body's weight, and I know it's still there. Memoria mea, burnt sienna, a clot of regret. Limba materna, its letters still line my throat. Its old curses live in my fingertips. Thank you very much. So the sequences walk-out, walk-out, ojie. The first is from Skuna Flight, Adios Carinage, Starato Kingdom, when I really started to enjoy walk-out. In idle August, while the sea soft, and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim of this Caribbean, I blow out the light by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion to ship as a seaman on the Skuna Flight. Out in the yard, turning gray in the dawn, I stood like a stone and nothing else moved. But the cold sea rippling like galvanized and the male holes of stars in the skyroof. Till a wind start to interfere with the trees, I passed me dry neighbors sweeping she yard, and I went as I went downhill. And I nearly said, sweep soft your witch, because she don't sleep hard. But the bitch look right through me like I was dead. A rude taxi pull-up, park lights still on. The driver size up my bags with a grin, this time shall be like you're really gone. I answered, yes. I simply pile in the back seat and watch the sky burn above Laventil, pink as the gown in which the woman I left was sleeping. And I look in the rear view mirror and I see a man exactly like me and the man was weeping for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island. Christ have mercy on all sleeping things. From that dog rotting down Rison Road to when I was a dog on these streets, if loving these islands must be my load, out of corruption my soul takes wings. But they had started to poison my soul with their big house, big car, big time bobble, Cooley, nigger, Syrian and French Creole. So I leave it for them and their carnival. I take in a seabass, I go down the road. I know these islands, from Monos to Nassau, a rusty head sailor with sea green eyes that they nicknamed Shabin, the patrol for any red nigger. And I, Shabin, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I am just a red nigger who loved the sea. I had a sound colonial education. I have Dutch, nigger and English in me and either I am nobody or I am a nation. From white egrets, number 32, be happy now at cap for the simplest joys. For the line of white egrets prompting the last word. For the seas recitation reentering my head with questions it erases. Canceling the demonic voice by which I have recently been possessed, unheard it whispers the way the fiend does to a mad man who gibbers to his bloody hands that he was seized. The way the sea swivels in the conch's air, like the roar of applause that precedes the actor with increased doubt to the pitch of the paralyzed horror that his prime is past. If it is true that my gift has withered, that there's little left of it, if this man is right, then there's nothing else to do but abandon poetry like a woman because you love it and would not see her hurt least of all by me. So walk to the cliff's edge and soar above it, the jealousy, the spite, the nastiness. With the grace of a frigate over barrel of beef, it's rock. Be grateful that you wrote well in this place. Let the torn poems sail from you like a flock of white egrets in a long last sigh of release. So I never really thought I'd read a poem from a phone, but I'm trying to get with the technology. I wrote this about two days before the launch of Morning Paramount. Derek and I had sat going over the program and I was trying for him to be as little distressed as possible with the complications of the evening to come and it was just wonderful just sitting there. And then he gave us a fright on the night of the performance and I thought, oh God, let it not be prophetic. So this is called evening signal point for obvious reasons. Year end, nothing so grand as immeasurable thankfulness. It is enough and so much more for this gift of gentle sailing into dusk for his being here in this December soon ending for daughters who will visit, bringing joy and the clatter of grandchildren to a house grown too suddenly still amid the cresting traffic of sea breakers. For this porch, it's shingled brim, shading another miraculous hour, unfolding the gift of soft flannel sky and its wrinkled reflection. For roomy veils of sea spray, making ghosts of far off tankers fading fast past signal point. The tow line horizon is also blurring, bird like an unraveling thread already late and still so much magnificence in an ashen wash of unrushed light. Thank you. Good evening. Bleaker Street by Derek Walker. Xia日不理可接. Xia天時和閃聞凝蒙裸身倦怠為想像中的歸來而永久的無所事事稀有的長笛,持腳,八月臥室裡糾結的床單,星期天的炎, oh, Xiao Di Qin. 當我把夏日木色暗在一起時,那是一個月的街頭,手風琴和噴水器撲裂成灰綠,從我身體裡跑出去的小影子,音樂齊齊合合,不理可接上義大利語,我的義大利亞,你好, Antonio. 孩子們的吸水聲撕開玫瑰紅的天空,紫河唐柳而下,鼻息裡的黃昏水的氣味,沿著人滿垃圾的街道,不把你帶到水邊,而在老海中聚籠這些島嶼和檸檬,這裡有紐約哈的順河,像火焰中的海,我在炎炎夏日裡為你擠衣,然後笑,然後擦乾你溫柔的身體,假如你來了. Looking for Maya, where you disappeared, the land split into oceans and islands. Once upon a time there was a huge cloud. My father waved his hand and cut it into sky and ocean. My mother shaped the clays into humans, and all this happened in the dark. Let there be light, and there came the light. Let there be words, and there came the words of flowers and the stones. Once upon a flower, a fish came out, flying between the sky and the earth, and once upon a fish, a sun came out. Another sun, another sun, another sun. The stones turned into other animals that couldn't stand the heat of the sun, and my father kicked the suns like kicking the footballs out of the universe. Looking one in mid-air to tell stories. Once upon a story, my sister Maya and I were drawing words on rocks, bamboos, and silk made by silkworms. She liked to draw teeth in flowers and feet for the fish and the fish birds. All creatures had wings flying around, but she wanted them to stop and to stay on earth. Then came an earthquake that split the land into many continents and islands, and I saw her move further and further away until there was an ocean between us. Thousands of years have passed, but the words that we share makes me feel immortal, and I'm still looking for her, my sister Maya, to see how she's doing with her words. I go to Japan and I see many similar words, but she's not there. I go to Malaysia, Philippine, Hawaii, and all the islands in the Pacific Ocean, and I see many traces until I land on East Island, and from there I reach Chile and Peru, and I leave many traces for her to find me. I leave threads, silk, and bamboos, and I travel north, and finally in Guatemala and Mexico, I see her descendants in caves and slums. They have lost their words, and they write the words of flowers and stones, and they write in Roman alphabet. They talk about poetry as if studied in Spain, and they completely ignore their oral history and the ancient oral history and ancient language and writing. Sister Maya is dead, half of me is dead. Shut up, a voice came from San Lucia. He says, tell your own story. Yes, sir, this is my own story. I have, I am Mayan Chinese, Taiwanese, Sumerian, Egyptian, African, Zulu, Lulu, Inu, Sami, San Lucia, and all in me, and I'm either nobody or I'm sky, earth, ocean, birds, fish, wind, cloud, rain, rainbow, rain forest, all in one body. I cannot find this island. I cannot find this island loveliest in drought. I love it best, all silver-green with rain, when clouds creep off La Saucière and down the moan. Right now, it is a wasteland, creaking in drought. We live by merely willing it, our sins have found us out. I wish I was a priestess in some vast, pyrrhic cult, dancing howling round a churning fire that never would go out, burning sweet smoke to join a cloud and make a path through doubt, boiling incantations, screaming rain. To see this island once again emerald, shooting rainbows through the rain, shimmering in silver cloud rings, or moonlit midnight's deep sapphire, with silver leaping in fish flashes from the blackened sea. The derrick one is odd job, a bull terrier. You prepare for one sorrow, but another comes. It is not like the weather. You cannot brace yourself. The unreadiness is all. Your companion, the woman, the friend next to you, the child at your side, and the dog, we tremble for them. We look seaward and muse, it will rain. We shall get ready for rain. You do not connect the sunlight altering the darkening oleanders in the sea garden, the gold going out of the palms. You do not connect this, the fleck of the drizzle on your flesh with the dog's whimper. The thunder doesn't frighten, the readiness is all. What follows at your feet is trying to tell you the silence is all. It is deeper than the readiness. It is sea deep, earth deep, love deep. The silence is stronger than thunder. We are stricken, dumb and deep as the animals who never utter love as we do, except it becomes unutterable and must be said in a whimper, in tears, in the drizzle that comes to our eyes, not uttering the loved thing's name, the silence of the dead. The silence of the deepest buried love is the one silence. And whether we bear it for beast, for child, for woman or friend, it is the one love. It is the same and it is blessed. Deepest by loss, it is blessed. It is blessed. This is called Toussaint Louverture. Called to catch the light right, I wasn't blind, I was one-eyed. No, I was just other-eyed and what I could half see were shadows and forms, absence more than presence. They have called Midri Gau from the French derivative of Ricard, tainted name, corruption, variant of Richard from the Norman, which means powerful leader, a joke from the gods for it would not be my destiny to lead but to render the leader. He, I painted in profile like something from Velazquez so you could see the half open gate of the mouth where the wind could walk in and leave quickly like a father or a purple hummingbird could nearly come and go if it's so pleased, aperture of the mouth and the eye to a mouth as if the general was beginning to sing. I saw him once but this is not him half seen on my half aisle, a photograph light-ridden, the upright general in blue and gold regalia, Hydra, Brahma, head out of time but I could not show you the cannonballs sailing to that face, the bruised eye, the cracked teeth. I put in the general's graying hair, Iroko tree, crown him, dethrone him. I took away his sword, I took away his bicorne hat, eye who was not the one to take away his teeth. Toussaint, touss, touss, mons et mons, touss another word for beauty, everything all more than the eye, l'ouverture and overture and opening wrought from some love's virtue, the verdant mind that makes what I wanted to paint was Toussaint but not a body if you could call it that, a thing that could be tied and sliced and wrecked and loved and cleaned. I wanted to paint an ambush of space or a being with a viscera of flowers, nearly that to say how we loved in spite of bones, not just the hummingbird self which he is of course colibri, one garnish but the sensation of those wings, but I had to make a man. I try to find openings everywhere with paint, paint being anything that could hold up the light. Give thanks. And for the birthday of our beloved Derek Walcott, I read his perfect poem from the fortunate traveler, the season of phantasmal peace. Then all the nations of birds lifted together, the huge net of the shadows of this earth in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues stitching and crossing it. They lifted up the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes, the shadows of glass face towers down evening streets, the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill, the net rising soundless at night, the birds cries soundless until there was no longer dusk or season decline or weather, only this passage of phantasmal light that not the narrowest shadow dare to sever. And men could not see looking up what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trail behind them in silvery ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight. They could not hear battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries, bearing the net higher, covering this world like the vines of an orchard or a mother drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to sleep. It was the light that you will see at evening on the side of a hill in yellow October, and no one hearing knew what change had brought into the ravens' coin, the killed air's screech, the embers' circling cho, such an immense soundless and high concern. For the fields and cities where the birds belong, except it was their seasonal passing, love made seasonless or from the high privilege of their birth something brighter than pity for the wingless ones below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices above all change, betrayals of falling suns, and this season lasted one moment like the pause between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, but for such as our earth is now, it lasted long. I used to be young poet, you know, of Rilke, and it begins with a quotation from the great Czech poet, Tefouame Vosch, and the quotation says, what is poetry, which does not save nations or people? Ask the question, not once, but 49 times, and perhaps at the 50th, you will get an answer, or perhaps not. Then ask it again, this time, till 70 times seven, ask, as you open the door of every book of poems that you enter, ask it of every poem, regardless of how beautiful that whispers, lie with me. Do not spare your newborn, if the first cry, first line, is not a wailing for an answer, abandon it. As for the stillborn, turn the next blank white sheet over, shroud it, ask the clamoring procession of all the poems of the ages, each measured white-haired epic, every flouncing, free-versed table-tot, to state their names, where they have come from, and what their business is with you. You live in the Kaizura of our times, the sound of nations, persons breaking around you. If poetry can only save itself, then who will hear it after it has fled from the nations and the people that it could not save, even a remnant of, for a remembering? I want to thank Christian, the poem he chose is exactly the one I chose, and for exactly the same reason, well, it's part of the same reason, I think in any language, any, they're out of millions of poems that have been composed, oral and written, I think they have very few poems that are perfect. This, for me, is one of them, the season of phantasmal peace, and all the nations of birds lifted together the huge net of the shadows of this earth, in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it. They lifted up the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes, the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets, the shadow of frail plants on a city sill, the net rising, sound less as night, the birds' cries sound less until there was no longer dusk or season, decline or weather, only this passage of phantasmal light, but not the narrowest shadow, dared to sever, and the man could not see, looking up what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight. They could not hear battalions of stallions, of starlings waging peaceful cries, bearing the net higher, covering this world like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to sleep. It was the light that you will see that evening on the side of a hill in yellow October, and no one hearing knew what change had brought into the ravens' coying to kill their screech, the ember-circling trough, such an immense, soundless, and high concern for the fields and cities where the birds belong, except it was their seasonal passing made seasonless, or from the high privilege of their birth, something brighter than pity, for the wingless ones below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses, and higher they lifted the net, with soundless voices above all change, betrayals of falling suns, and this season lasted one moment like the pause between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, but for such as our Earth is now a lasted one. 2016 has been a terrible year, and I think one of the measures of the terribility of 2016 is that the Oxford dictionary has decreed that the word of the year is post-truth. If the word of the year is post-truth, we are in danger, we are in trouble, and they think I'm gonna read the poem by the new collection, Paramimmoning, because as many, well, all the time when I read that, I find answers, I find antidotes to the terribility of the world, and this is a poem about truth, about those simple truth that are really the ones that remind us of our humanity, of who we are, and how we can really counteract this post-truth of 2016. It's called Lyperu's Wall. Along the cemetery wall of Lyperu's of Port of Spain, Trinidad, I saw this truth, a fellow walking with a floral umbrella that seems both parasol and parachute. All our wishes are still rooted in ground, but solid as a hydrant on a seal of the sidewalk. Both urgent and casual, the painting is in dialect with its big shoes and heavy eyeglasses, almost a cartoon. But in the perspective of the wall, there is both infinity and patience, the qualities that are praised in a protestant inn. The parasol, I would say, belongs to his dead wife. It floats him, determined, ruminant in the hot sun, above the street and roofs. He passes the same street every day, repetitive as the painting of himself. Lyperu's Wall, along the cemetery wall of Lyperu's of Port of Spain, Trinidad, he really saw it. A guy walking with a floral umbrella that seems to be both parasol and parachute. All our wishes are still rooted in ground, both solid as a hydrant on a sidewalk. Both urgent and casual, the painting is in dialect, with its big shoes and heavy eyeglasses, which make a cartoon. But in the perspective of the wall, there is both infinity and patience, the qualities that are praised in a protestant inn. The parasol, I would say, belongs to his dead wife. It floats him, determined, ruminant in the hot sun, below the street and roofs. The man passes the same street every day, repetitive as the painting of himself. Happy birthday, Derek. Song and symphony, second movement. The chastening chords of dark passages, the discordant notes, the end of prostrate, purging interludes of sorrow. And after, with patient hand, here you are, you've waited. Our days turned around and over, yesterday, tomorrow, brief, certain now, and I remember, do you? Across the valley, the violas echo, and that epiphanic evening of the garden rainbow, when we knew us in love's unambiguous light. Oh, don't say you have forgotten that promise of paradiso. The beatific heart of the matter of, yes, my faithful love, love. The beatific heart of the matter of, yes, my faithful love, love. In the meantime, the blessed declining ordinary, the broomseller at the corner, karaoke bar above the grocery, raisin bread and custards from Coral Street for your tea, measuring medications, nodding over the evening news, settling our backs into our corners. Can this make a song, a certain melody drawn from your old guitar, this companionship, soft, aromatic as aging incense, these remembrances, that persistent chord coming through the hibiscus hedge, that persistent chord coming through the hibiscus hedge, like a Patrick Centelois tender mazook. Come, shake the legs free of this age, it's idolatry of death, crutches of belly aching, damned, numbing noise without living rhythm, paralysis of those who limp with crippling pride in their dark, come, a last close rubber dub to bass and drum, heart near to heart, breast to lifting breast and all, we've kept it all, we've kept the time. Now let us go in, leave the dark garden. Now let us go in, leave the dark garden to the Coralita, Croutons and fragrance of spider lilies, govers and golden apples somewhere in their shadows. Again, I hear the distant orchestras echo, strings and horns, a solo canter, and do you hear our name in the song? Come, the threshold of night, we shall meet ourselves in love, without ambiguous twilight, coupled, singular, familiar, embraced at doorways in light of rainbows, separate and particular, and leave behind forever the sliver season of the moon. The sliver season of the moon has come round again over the hill quarter of Monnier. From Grand Riviera, the avenue climbs through blossoming lint, yellow avocado, golden browning menorahs of mango, the exuberant lavender of glory's cedar, below the roofs and branches, fluorescent current and maracil edge the evening ocean. Your love returns, certain as the lunar's phasing of its age, as the pulsing of hearts and petals, as the approaching bulk of hill grows itself a dark wedge against the sliver season. Of the moon, Derek Walcott, dark August. Thank you. Dark August, so much rain, so much life like the swollen sky of this black August. My sister, the sun, broods in her yellow room and won't come out. Everything goes to hell. The mountains fume like a kettle, rivers overrun, still she will not rise and turn off the rain. She's in her room, fondling old things, my poems turning her album. Even if thunder falls like a crash of plates from the sky, she does not come out. Don't you know I love you, but I'm hopeless at fixing the rain. But I'm learning slowly to love the dark days, the steaming hills, the air with gossiping mosquitoes and to sip the medicine of bitterness so that when you emerge, my sister, parting the beads of the rain, with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness, all will not be as it was, but it will be true. You see, they will not let me love as I want because my sister then, I would have learned to love black days like bright ones, the black rain, the white hills. When once, I loved only my happiness and you. Exterior, the sea, continuous. We hurtle over water, no narrator tells us why. No flecks of white suit each explain the speed, the height, we are only flying. And when the flat horizon, like a Brit, concedes now there to thought and the only sail hoists itself in view, it's not as if we knew we'd find it there. It's more as if day couldn't hold it back and told a story. So we slow towards the sail, the brightly decked white populated craft. We hear the baseline, then melody, the shrieks that follow jokes, then after shrieks of the same joke explained, translated or retold for the stranger beaming, then anecdote, opinion, small talk, gossip, rumour, secret. And we're here amid a deck clode of delighted folk we know and don't know, floating down the West to Soufriere. The boys all at the prow of the life this is in the phrase, this is the life. The girls sublime as some old poet has it with or without a hat. And it's that time the present shoulders in like a middle son, feckless and high between his graver brothers, making them wonder what if I lived like that with an affection shading into envy, but ebbing as they extricate themselves from his beery orbit after the pictures taken. And after the pictures taken on we sail, still in the picture quieter as if quiet might coax it into cranking up again, whatever it was we have that can't be cut from, faded or dissolved from, only moved from, widened out from, all the sounds in order, bowing out, the jollity, the uproar, the melody, the baseline, the beat. Then nothing told, no flecks of white suit each explaining, no narrator, no sun sets as fast as we are left with paper. Nothing flies as fast as we are left with words. There's a fresh light that follows a storm while the whole sea still havoc in its bright wake. I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion marrying the ocean, then drifting away in the widening lace of her bridal train and white gulls her bridesmaids till she was gone. I wanted nothing after that day. Across my own face, like the face of the sun, a light rain was falling with the sea calm. Fall gently, rain, on the sea's upturned face. Like a girl's showering, make these islands fresh as Shabin once knew them. Let every trace, every hot road, smell like clothes she just pressed and sprinkled with drizzle. I finished dream, whatever the rain wash and the sun iron, the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam, is clothes enough for my nakedness. Then my flight never passed the incoming tide of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs of the final Bahamas. I am satisfied if my hand gave voice to one people's grief. Open the map, more islands there, man, and peas on a tin plate, all different size. 1,000 in the Bahamas alone, from mountains to low scrub with coral keys. And from this bowsprit, I bless every town. The blue smell of smoke can heal behind them and the one small road winding down them like twine to the roofs below. I have only one theme, the bowsprit, the arrow, the long, the lunging heart, the flight to a target whose aim we'll never know. Vein search for one island that heals with its harbor and a guiltless horizon where the almond's shadow doesn't injure the sand. There are so many islands, as many islands as the stars at night, on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken, like falling fruit around the schooner flight. But things must fall, and so it always was, on one hand Venus on the other Mars, fall and our one, just as this earth is one island in archipelagos of stars. My first friend was the sea. Now is my last, I stop talking now. I work, then I read, cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast. I try to forget what happiness was and when I don't work I study the stars. Sometimes it's just me and a soft, scissored foam as the deck turn white and the moon open, the cloud like a door and the light over me is a road in white moonlight taking me home. Shabin sang to you from the depths of the sea. Got to have kaianow, got to have kaianow for the rain is falling, Bob Marley. So the poem of... Marley was rocking on the transport's stereo and the beauty was humming the choruses quietly. I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheeks streaked and defined them. If this were a portrait you'd leave the highlights for last. These lights silkened her black skin. I'd have put in an airing, something simple in gold for contrast but she wore no jewelry. I imagined a powerful and sweet odour coming from her as from a still panther and the head was nothing else but heraldic. When she looked at me this way from me politely because any staring at strangers is impolite. It was like a statue, like a black Delacroix, liberty leading the people. The gently bulging whites of her eyes, the carved ebony mouth, the heft of the torso solid and a woman's but the heft of a solo solid and a woman's. But gradually even that was going in the dusk except the line of her profile and the line of her eyes. The line of her profile and the highlight and the highlight cheek and I thought, oh beauty, you are the light of the world. It was not the only time I would think of that phrase in the 16-eater transport that hummed between Grove, Islet and the market with its grit of charcoal and the litter of vegetables after Sunday sales and the roaring rum shops outside whose bright doors you saw drunken women on pavements, the saddest of all things, winding up their week, winding down their week. The market as it closed on this Saturday night, remembered a childhood of wandering gas lanterns, hung and poles at street corners and the old row of vendors and traffic when the lamp lighter climbed, hooked the lantern on its pole and moved on to another and the children turned their faces to its moth, their eyes white as their nighties. The market itself was closed in, it was the market itself was closed in its involved darkness and the shadows quarreled for bread in the shops or quarreled for the formal custom of quarrelling in the electric rum shops. I remember the shadows. The van was slowly filling in the darkening depot I sat in the front seat, I had no need for time. I looked at two girls, one in a yellow bodice and yellow shorts with a flower in her hair and lusted in peace, the other less interesting. That evening I had walked the streets of the town where I was born and grew up, thinking of my mother and her white hair tinted by the dying dusk and the tilting box houses that seemed perverse in their cramps. I had peered into parlours with half-closed jealousies at the dim furniture, morris chairs, a center table with wax flowers and the lithograph of Christ of the Sacred Heart, vendors still selling to the empty streets, sweets, nuts, sodden chocolates, nut cakes, mint. An old woman with a straw hat over her headkerchief hobbled towards us with a basket. Somewhere some distance off was a heavier basket that she couldn't carry. She was in a panic. She said to the driver, par qui-ti moit a tir, forgive my pronunciation, which in her part, which is in her part to her, don't leave me stranded, which is in her history and that of her people. Don't leave me on earth or by a shift of stress, don't leave me on earth for an inheritance. Par, par, par qui-ti moit a tir, heavenly transport, don't leave me on earth, I've had enough of it. The bus filled in the dark with heavy shadows that would not be left on earth, no, that would be left on the earth and would have to make out abandonment was something they had grown used to. And I had abandoned them. I knew that they're sitting in the transport in the sea quiet dusk with men hunched in canoes and the orange lights from the veggie headland, black boats on the water. I, who could never solidify my shadow to be one of their shadows, had left them their earth, their white rum quarrels, and their coal bags, their hatred of corperals of all authority. I was deeply in love with the woman by the window. I wanted to be going home with her this evening. I wanted her to have the key to our small house by the beach at Grove Hillet. I wanted her to change into a smooth white knighty that would pour like water over the black rocks of her breasts, to lie simply beside her by the ring of a brass lamp with a kerosene wick and tell her in silence that her hair was like a hill forest at night, that a trickle of rivers was in her armpits, that I would buy her benign if she wanted it and never leave her honor, but the others too. Because I felt a great love that could bring me to tears and a pity that prittled my eyes like a nettle, I was afraid I might suddenly start sobbing on the public transport with the Marley going and a small boy peering over the shoulders of the driver and me at the lights coming at the rush of the road in the country darkness with the lamps in the houses on the small hills and thickets of stars. I had abandoned them, I had left them on earth, I left them to sing Marley's songs of a sadness as real as the smell of rain on dry earth or the smell of damp sand and the bus felt warm with their neighborliness, their consideration and the polite partings in the light of its headlamps. In the blair, in the thud sobbing music, the claiming scent that came from their bodies, I wanted the transport to continue forever for no one was to descend and say good night in the beams of the lamps and take the crooked path up to the lit door guided by fireflies. I wanted her beauty to come into the warmth of considerate wood in the relieved rattling of enamel plates in the kitchen and the tree in the yard, but I came to my stop. Outside the Halcyon hotel, the lounge would be full of transients like myself, then I would walk with the surf up the beach. I got off the van without saying good night. Good night would be full of inexpressible love. They went on, on their transport, they left me on earth. Then a few yards ahead, the van stopped. A man shouted my name from the transport window. I walked up towards him. He held out something. A pack of cigarettes had dropped from my pocket. He gave it to me. I turned, hiding my tears. There was nothing they wanted, nothing I could give them, but this thing I have called the light of the world. So happy birthday to Derek Wolcott, who is the light of our world. Thank you. It has been an evening of exhilarating, entertaining, and experience. As we unravel the penmanship of Derek Wolcott through the voices that we're here today to share in that joy. It has been an evening of exhilarating, entertaining, entertaining, entertaining, and continue to share today to share in that joy. We went through the pages of his various books, the most recent being of course Morning Paramine, A Fortunate Traveller. I now know that there is such a thing as a perfect poem, testified by two great writers, Kendall and Christian. In our audience tonight, we have the great pleasure of having had three lecturers of the Nobel laureate, Glen Maxwell, the answer Glen, Christian Kambum, Paul Breslin, and Jamaica Kingkid who will do us the honors tomorrow. As I said, we've also had the Creole, very appreciative for that, as you know Derek says, and he says, those of us who read Omar Asundu of the opening scene in a fight between two of the characters and it's really a gruesome fight over an empty can, a can that had been used to transport fish and to see the way the violence erupts and the language that is used in that is Creole, the usage at its best. So the poems we've heard today have been beautifully selected. I'm sure the writers, the writers who are themselves poets were very intimate in choosing and arriving at the choice so you had McDonald opening the innings with a far cry from Africa. How many runs you've got? But a far cry from Africa, it was Kuna Fly, there was Orjab, Season of Phantasmal Peace, Forty Acres and the Mules from Star Apple Kingdom. So all in all again I want to thank each and every one of you for making it here. It's such a beautiful thing when we celebrate the penmanship of Derek Walker that I said and such a great consolation, a great emotive feeling when people come from all over the world to celebrate with us in St. Lucia. So let's all stand and sing happy birthday to Derek. We must do that. And thank you once again for being here.