Trini Tuesday-Derek Walcott

I receive the daily email from Writer's Almanac.  It features a poem a day as well as little blurbs about things related to historic literary events of the day.  I highly recommend it.  I was reminded in Monday's email that it was the birthday of Derek Walcott, a Nobel Laureate and adopted Trinidadian.

 Although he was born in St. Lucia, he moved to Trinidad at the age of 23 and a few years later formed the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. He wrote and produced numerous plays and wrote as a drama and art critic as well. He has lived so long in Trinidad and nurtured so many artists and writers on the island that he has been adopted as one of their own (showing how open Trinis are, anyone can be a Trini if they show an openess and a concern for the well-being of the culture and people). In 1992 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (which has also been won by born and bred Trini, V.S. Naipual)

First, a favorite of his poems...

Love After Love

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

And a couple of his quotes, which I quite like...

I read; I travel; I become.

Break a vase, and the loves that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.