11. For Sigrid (from ‘The Bounty’) by Derek Walcott - A Friend to Mark

By The Poetry Exchange

The Poetry Exchange

23/05/16·20m 44s

In this episode of the podcast, you will hear Mark talking about the poem that has been a friend to him: ’For Sigrid' by Derek Walcott.

Mark visited The Poetry Exchange at The Chapel in St Chad's College as part of Durham Book Festival in October 2015. We’re very grateful to Durham Book Festival, New Writing North and St

Chad’s College for hosting The Poetry Exchange. Thank you also to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for kindly granting permission for us to use the poem in this way.

Mark is in conversation with The Poetry Exchange team members, Fiona Lesley Bennett and Michael Schaeffer.

'For Sigrid' is read by Michael Schaeffer.

*****

‘For Sigrid’ from ‘The Bounty’

by Derek Walcott.

The sea should have settled him, but its noise is no help.

I am talking about a man whose doors invite a sail

to cross a kitchen-sill at sunrise, to whom the reek of kelp

drying in the sunlit wind on the chattering shoal

or the veils of a drizzle hazing a narrow cave

are a phantom passion; who hears in the feathering lances

of grass a soundless siege, who, when a bird skips a wave,

feels an arrow shoot from his heart and his wrist dances.

He sees the full moon in daylight, the sky’s waning rose,

the gray wind, his nurse trawling her shawl of white lace;

whose wounds were sprinkled with salt but who turns over their horrors

with each crinkling carapace. I am talking about small odysseys

that, with the rhythm of a galley, launch his waking house

in the thinning indigo hour, as he mutters thanks over

the answer of a freckled, forgiving back in creased linen,

its salt neck and damp hair, and, rising from cover,

to the soundless pad of a leopard or a mewing kitten,

unscrews the coffee-jar and measures two and a half spoons,

and pauses, paralyzed by a sail crossing blue windows,

then dresses in the half-dark, dawn-drawn by the full moon’s

magnet, until her light-heaving back is a widow’s.

She drags the tides and she hauls the heart by hawsers

stronger than any devotion, and she creates monsters

that have pulled god-settled heroes from their houses

and shawled women watching the fading of the stars.

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