THE BELIEVER

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009

I AM ASTONISHED AT THE SUNFLOWERS SPINNING

A NEW POEM

by Derek Walcott

I am astonished at the sunflowers spinning
in huge green meadows above the indigo sea,
amazed at their aureate silence, though they sing
with the inaudible hum of the clocks over Recanati.

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Derek Walcott was born in St. Lucia in 1930. He is the author of eight collections of plays and a book of essays. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. White Egrets is his fourteenth collection of poems.