TUESDAY POEM - After The Storm by Derek Walcott

Vigil (detail from a painting in progress)

Before posting today's poem I want to stand with you and send love and healing energy to the US East Coast; to hold a vision of protection for all our friends and relatives in the path of Hurricane Sandy and to ask that the destructive potential of this storm be transmuted into one of cleansing and purification. We are one land under one sky; one people with shared stories, shared waterways and coastlines. . . Let us send fierce and tender love whenever our thoughts are drawn to the East Coast. Collective prayers and focused energy are a power and gift beyond measure. 

Stitched flotilla adrift in an archipelago of stars (work in progress)

                                  After The Storm 

                                  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 are one, just as this earth is one

                                  island in archipelagoes 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 that don't work, I study the stars.

                                  Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam

                                  as the deck turn white and the moon open

                                  a cloud like a door, and the light over me

                                  is a road in white moonlight taking me home.

                                  Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

                           Derek Walcott

After The Storm - details from a work in progress

This week's Tuesday Poem editor is Harvey Molloy

with When We Watched Movies

by New Zealander Tim Upperton

To enjoy a rich variety of poems, please click on the quill. 

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xo Be safe. Take care, dear friends xo