FEBRUARY 2010
NO OPERA
A NEW POEM
by Derek Walcott
|
No opera, no gilded columns, no wine-dark seats,
no Penelope scouring the stalls with delicate glasses,
no practised ecstasy from the tireless tenor, no sweets
and wine at no interval, no altos, no basses
and violins sobbing as one; no opera house,
no museum, no actual theatre, no civic center
—and what else? Only the huge doors of clouds …
|
To read the rest of this piece, please purchase this issue of the Believer online or at your local bookseller.
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. The poems published in this issue (as well as those in the October and November/December 2009 issues) are from his forthcoming collection of poems, White Egrets, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April.
