Egypt, Tobago
There is a shattered palm
on this fierce shore,
its plumes the rusting helm-
et of a dead warrior.
Numb Antony, in the torpor
stretching her inert
sex near him like a sleeping cat,
knows his heart is the real desert.
Over the dunes
of her heaving,
to his heart's drumming
fades the mirage of the legions,
across love-tousled sheets,
the triremes fading.
Ar the carved door of her temple
a fly wrings its message.
He brushes a damp hair
away from an ear
as perfect as a sleeping child's.
He stares, inert, the fallen column.
He lies like a copper palm
tree at three in the afternoon
by a hot sea
and a river, in Egypt, Tobago
Her salt marsh dries in the heat
where he foundered
without armor.
He exchanged an empire for her beads of sweat,
the uproar of arenas,
the changing surf
of senators, for
this silent ceiling over silent sand -
this grizzled bear, whose fur,
moulting, is silvered -
for this quick fox with her
sweet stench. By sleep dismembered,
his head
is in Egypt, his feet
in Rome, his groin a desert
trench with its dead soldier.
[...] Read more
poem by Derek Walcott
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
