The Writing Artist- Derek Walcott

Today would have been my grandfather’s 88th birthday and he was the one to buy me my first book of poems sold in the Scholastic magazine at school. The bible was his book, the psalms his poems. He was the son of a fisherman, born on a boat between St. Thomas and Puerto Rico where the two sides of his family resided. Many summers he carried me to St. Thomas where I not only got to know my family but learned about Caribbean culture. So I’ve chosen today’s writing artist with him in mind. I love you Gramps!

Derek Walcott is a Caribbean painter, playwright and poet from St. Lucia. Although he was a formally trained painter, at the age of 19, with $200 of borrowed money, he printed his own collection of poetry titled 25 Poems and gave it out on street corners. He went on to write several poetry collections including In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, The Prodigal, Selected Poems. Omeros and White Egrets. His commitment to celebrating and preserving the spirit of the Caribbean through his words earned him a Nobel Prize. Walcott’s plays and art are also rooted in strong displays of social and political aspects of the West Indian life. Below I give you his poem Love After Love.

 

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.

-        Derek Walcott

~ Nia Andino ~

The Writing Artist- Jacqueline Bishop

Today's writing artist pick is Jamaican poet, writer and painter Jacqueline Bishop. She is the author of River’s Song, Fauna, Snapshots from Istanbul, My Mother Who Is Me: Life Stories from Jamaican Women in New York and Writers Who Paint/Painters Who Write: Three Jamaican Artists. Bishop founded and is currently still editor for Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, an arts magazine that focuses on highlighting Latino and the Caribbean voices. Below is her poem Transmigration of the Souls.

Transmigration of the Souls

The things that women fear and worry about are different from the things that men fear and worry about. Put another way, our concerns, our preoccupations, do not line up,

like soldiers at attention, one behind the other. When I married my cousin Charles Darwin, my friend since childhood, I knew that I had married a thinking man.

Before I married him I knew about his thoughts on transmutation, the writings

that filled one notebook after another. Time and time again he would come back

to the idea that people now so easily call Natural Selection, circling it, as astutely as

a hunter circles its prey. Somehow I knew even then that one day he would do the

unthinkable: take God out of the equation altogether and just that thought alone made him sick, made his entire family sick, with one ailment after another. Charles, in fact,

was never again to enjoy the robust health he had enjoyed while voyaging on the Beagle.

I want to be able to say that I, Emma Darwin, never questioned the means and motives

of my husband Charles Darwin, but that would be a lie. For it was as a wife, a woman,

and the mother of his children, that I cautioned him: Charles, be careful in what it is

that you are bringing to fruition, this thing that you are so hunched over in your study, day after day creating, for your doubts and assignations and endless questioning might so

anger the God I still believe in that he prevents us meeting in the afterlife and, like we have long wanted, always belonging to each other

-        Jacqueline Bishop

~ Nia Andino ~