Forest Of Europe Poem by Derek Walcott

Forest Of Europe

Rating: 3.2


The last leaves fell like notes from a piano
and left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled on these scattered manuscripts of snow.

The inlaid copper laurel of an oak
shines though the brown-bricked glass above your head
as bright as whisky, while the wintry breath
of lines from Mandelstam, which you recite,
uncoils as visibly as cigarette smoke.

'The rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva.'
Under your exile's tongue, crisp under heel,
the gutturals crackle like decaying leaves,
the phrase from Mandelstam circles with light
in a brown room, in barren Oklahoma.

There is a Gulag Archipelago
under this ice, where the salt, mineral spring
of the long Trail of Tears runnels these plains
as hard and open as a herdsman's face
sun-cracked and stubbled with unshaven snow.

Growing in whispers from the Writers' Congress,
the snow circles like cossacks round the corpse
of a tired Choctaw till it is a blizzard
of treaties and white papers as we lose
sight of the single human through the cause.

So every spring these branches load their shelves,
like libraries with newly published leaves,
till waste recycles them—paper to snow—
but, at zero of suffering, one mind
lasts like this oak with a few brazen leaves.

As the train passed the forest's tortured icons,
ths floes clanging like freight yards, then the spires
of frozen tears, the stations screeching steam,
he drew them in a single winters' breath
whose freezing consonants turned into stone.

He saw the poetry in forlorn stations
under clouds vast as Asia, through districts
that could gulp Oklahoma like a grape,
not these tree-shaded prairie halts but space
so desolate it mocked destinations.

Who is that dark child on the parapets
of Europe, watching the evening river mint
its sovereigns stamped with power, not with poets,
the Thames and the Neva rustling like banknotes,
then, black on gold, the Hudson's silhouettes?

From frozen Neva to the Hudson pours,
under the airport domes, the echoing stations,
the tributary of emigrants whom exile
has made as classless as the common cold,
citizens of a language that is now yours,

and every February, every 'last autumn',
you write far from the threshing harvesters
folding wheat like a girl plaiting her hair,
far from Russia's canals quivering with sunstroke,
a man living with English in one room.

The tourist archipelagoes of my South
are prisons too, corruptible, and though
there is no harder prison than writing verse,
what's poetry, if it is worth its salt,
but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

From hand to mouth, across the centuries,
the bread that lasts when systems have decayed,
when, in his forest of barbed-wire branches,
a prisoner circles, chewing the one phrase
whose music will last longer than the leaves,

whose condensation is the marble sweat
of angels' foreheads, which will never dry
till Borealis shuts the peacock lights
of its slow fan from L.A. to Archangel,
and memory needs nothing to repeat.

Frightened and starved, with divine fever
Osip Mandelstam shook, and every
metaphor shuddered him with ague,
each vowel heavier than a boundary stone,
'to the rustling of ruble notes by the lemon Neva,'

but now that fever is a fire whose glow
warms our hands, Joseph, as we grunt like primates
exchanging gutturals in this wintry cave
of a brown cottage, while in drifts outside
mastodons force their systems through the snow.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Darlan M Cunha 22 May 2017

He saw the poetry in forlorn stations under clouds vast as Asia [...] What is a amazing poem. Well... the world is too big to stay in one place.

4 1 Reply
Anil Kumar Panda 22 May 2017

Awesome! ! Use of metaphors is stunning. Loved the flow and beauty in stanzas. Very nice.

3 1 Reply
Edward Kofi Louis 22 May 2017

Like notes from a piano! Thanks for sharing this poem with us.

3 1 Reply
Tom Allport 22 May 2017

a very interesting and descriptive poem of a time of heavy snow and of men in the know? maybe there is a warning being given that should not to be forgotten! .................well written

3 0 Reply
Bernard F. Asuncion 22 May 2017

Watching the evening river mint.... thanks for posting.....

2 0 Reply
Sylvia Frances Chan 07 November 2021

Chosen for the THIRD time in one year, true fascinating to notice and to realize how most lyrical this poem is. Congratulations to his closest famikly for this honour. I have enjoyed tremendously this most beautiful poem

0 0 Reply
Rose Marie Juan-austin 07 November 2021

Captivating opening lines that fuel one to read the entire marvelous work. Beautifully crafted and well executed.

1 0 Reply

Wonderful and powerful poem with compelling imagery.

1 0 Reply
Sylvia Frances Chan 05 May 2021

CONGRATULATIONS being chosen as The Modern Poem Of The Day. Hooray! WOW! Twice won in one year, Gorgeous news it was when he won the Noble Prize in 1992.

1 0 Reply
Sylvia Frances Chan 06 January 2021

IF you happened to follow him in his life, we can see here clearly that God is blessing him constantly. So obvious taht he got his artistic talents from God. The words Derek Walcott wrote in almost all his poems are so natural, beautiful and unique.

3 0 Reply
READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott

Castries / St Lucia
Close
Error Success