From Genesis:

THE MOON

Arched and pitched to light tight as a talking drum,
I move diurnal systems to a pure perpetual frenzy
of concentrated merry-making, my single-irised stare
pins lovers in their vestments, spins unproven music
to Dionysian currents purple in subordinate air,
fills this miser's ward with the silver coin of plenty;
I am Anarch, mistress and master of great Stonehenge,
my flock of caparisoned bearers make the mountain's song
in languages unknown to babbling man, to you I am moon,
call me by my proper name for though my name's too rich
my name is moon, it is not moon, I am moon, I am not moon,
my sly and slitted eye makes testaments unshed in flight,
self-regulated to that turn of tight and crescent compass
turning proven to the breakers time and time again;
when your barred room takes you hurtling past the fields
of burnt-out resin, mark the nodding poppies of oblivion,
fix your eyes upon my split wide-open single one, focus
your skidding mind on the pursed essential questions
of earth and sky, of being, of birth in bloody robes
to the pealing loons of childhood, answer me no answer
remote enough to deny its slight and slender secret,
yield it up without demur to my burning Cyclops eye,
know that I am your place in the comfort-making hearth,
that cell of bone and runic parchment, of papyrus pap
and driftwood, the last warm entreatment of the dark
before the trumpets shrill; I am your sister, your mother
moon am I confidant of couches robed in the analytic
cloth, visitor to hell, friend to traitor and debauch,
whore of god, my faith condoled by hellion and monarch,
I am this I am, moon-made and blighted, maker of moon.
 

___________________________

At the end of this sentence, rain will begin.
DEREK WALCOTT, Archipelagoes

At the end of this line there is an opening door.
DEREK WALCOTT, A Santa Cruz Quarter
__________________________
 

I

MONSOON

It starts with a change in the smell of weather,
a sour breath of moist air encumbered with soil,
its many pockets and spaces readying to shed
upwards their dark uncoilings; the earth unfolds
its gaseous element, changing the smell and colour
of the day, so every living thing must pause
in its proven endeavour and strive to replace 
the very contours of geography slipping away
to an essential stillness before the chaos of wind;
even the river knows something grave is happening
to its grim and single-minded currents furrowed
by the keel of history, trawled by the many spinning
sleepers fallen to its endlessly revolving arms;
even the changeful river knows a change is coming,
so when it does with a random casual thrust
of power mindful of its furthest reaches, it whips
brown vine and cracked bark, mangosteen and jackfruit,
slaps the baby palm, uproots the tapioca and lemon,
flattens the cowering tufts of pineapple, then douses
the world in unimagined torrents of water, maddened
by infinite rage and the resource of heartlessness
for unclocked hours, a constant torment of deluge
on the green land, the river, the annihilated air,
snake-holes flooded, spider-monkey and woodpecker
silenced, cats made fearful, cattle clustered,
the houses funneling that rush of wild water,
water pluming through its own wet world, fierce
in its dream of water, and water made flesh of water, 
in a perfect craze of water, the mother of water,
of the water creatures born of the water in this line.
 
 

II

SUMMER

Colour here is more than the pigments of vanity,
investiture of life holding fast its beating pulse
from the arid and featureless plains of shifting sand,
scooped and raised as if by a giant waving hand
in an endless symmetry of white on white; crested
motion stands apart in the colours of the desert, 
always the brightest, to make up for the absence
of language and landscape, white boats of folded light
set off across the splintered air, our footprints filled 
and sifted in terrifying unison, rhythmic curls
of disarray breathing past the ocean of uniformity, 
that sardonic sea without humour or pity, or water, 
only the permanent cadence of sand, aged and heated 
till its harsh advance invades our secret places, 
sets up home in our beds, our food, our buzzing heads,
investing its duned colonies, monuments to itself,
conspiring with the constant anxieties of wind
to make unequalled works of bright imaginings;
this pitiless masterpiece fashioned by the patient
fingers of the sun to last, outlive all others,
from crawling krait to scorpion seed and spiderspawn, 
the shuffling aimless human form, all go silhouetted 
against the enormous completion of sand, the sun's
gravedigger, a maker of monolith and fossil, mad 
memorials to the foolish and defiant, heat so dry
no figures move, no trees or caravanserai, no birds
but the friendly blurs of fever-strained invention,
the only sure escape from the always breathless
loving embrace of the empty metropolis of sand,
sand-made, to sand returned, drifting words of sand.

IV

DAWN

Surrounded by revellers of starlight and sea-scrum,
our green-grown house rehearses its strangest music,
electronic currents sparking triple-headed serpents
luminous and phosphorescent as sea monsters on shore, 
for the slowed time when all motion stills to a stop,
the hiss and slap of surf remains, other sound importuned
by torpor of fear and the random killing of the light, 
the stilled breath of air a mirror of our crowding need;
then the first anonymous flicker, instantly dismissed 
as the coy fumblings of some vacated hallucination,
newly made irrelevant, until the true paleness begins
to bleed across the baited sky a circumscribed swell of bass
cryptic as the unseen beat of Eden's demoniac percussionist,
a pulse-strumming contrarian whose perverse enjambments 
thicken the air to a glowing bubble of reflected firelight,
drives the dawn to a prodigious flowering, counterpoints
the sudden crack of crow and squirrel, mynah and parrot,
harmonises with the bone engine of chattering castanet
the swift machine of morning, scattering miracle's discs
like so much small change, desirous and profligate,
that oracular dawn reveals us for what we are:
a heaving tribe of rainbow bodies managing the feast,
as if each were a bowstring plucked and left to ring
within some signature time, a new and tonic metronome
more varied than the multi-modal jugglings of the sea;
out of control, speed-shaken, fearful, wide-eyed, weeping,
we grapple with the permanence of ecstasy and time,
negotiate the overwhelming steep anapests of our love
for all this frenzied mythmaking, its airiness and sound,
for the mystic sundered morning's holy page of dawn.
 

V

WINTER

Waking early in blue light I left the ancient house
you share with husband and child, left you sleeping
there, your unnamed encroachments creeping loud upon you,
to stumble past sequoia and oak, their twisted turrets
of upreaching wood gathering inwards a chill disclosure,
half-understood in the apocryphal fall of seasons,
a secret of sieved conspired light reluctant to be shared,
up where the delicate sister of air served up a shiver
so generous it propitiated every morning stir and spill
in the curving mists of mind-made Doune, where you wake
in your house of light to desolate knockings of the dead,
morning's slow-moving secret already spread, intoning
the monochrome inversions of tree-bole and stone,
appropriating hue and tone, the tumult of sunlight,
irregular pulsings of soil and dew, depleted and tamed
by the absence of filigree, the suspension of colour,
October's reasoned hibernation of flowering plants
snuffed to a distant knowledge of ash, grey on grey
in a blanked-out sky, a sky so distracted by cold
it can engender nothing, hinting then at even less,
its half-hearted promises nulled by a purifying
storm of tight impacted measure, as I hug my coat,
close to this conclusion, knowing well how it will be,
the practiced poise of winter, its insistent soothings 
and gaunt precisions, a sharp Omega of clarifying 
sealed into stone by the billowing white linen of snow
made omniscient, and so--I know and bless this ground,
the sodden bench where soon one morning you will sit,
unable to engineer a nostalgia of smell, or of me,
overcome by the winter first told you in this page.

VI

GRANDMOTHER

What stories you must know, there in your closed dominion,
secret narratives composed for the doomed enclosures
of bone, hair and fingernail fragments, the ancient
hoops of gold removed from your ears and wrists.
The light drowns to a shoreline uncertain and unseen
from this dim church, whitewashed on a hill in the lush south.
The congregation stands entranced, our white shirts and mundus
starched, sung aloft on ancient rhythms, the talismanic glow 
of hymns repeated in a tongue all of us remember and nobody
understands, some words promising a casual redemption:
barachimo, deyvam, slomo. The censers trembling
in the calloused hands of the patriarchs, passing the smoke
from hand to hand to the very end of this crowded room,
where Syriac, the first figure of testamented faith, waits
with his fierce accountings; your ally in the conundrums 
of Christ, the mother, her open heart in the calendar;
the two single beds in the hall where you and your husband
lived your lives in chaste matrimony, a wedlock holy as hands,
perfected your many children, the young dead become legend,
oversaw your strict enunciations of shekels, rice and prayer.
Then the slow erosions of memory, your tidy acres overgrown,
the ungentle strippin of names, faces, an ignoble disrobing 
for the writer you were, the first of our long line, 
until, stretching into eternity, alone in the old house
generations of sons and daughters embarked from, you faced
the curse of longevity visited on the women of this tribe 
with a wilful retrieval of dignity: the refusals
of food and water, the final naysaying to the sanctification 
of all who lived to your great age: a life-affirming no
that resounds still through the halls of your ruined house.