Omeros Quotes

“Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros

“what I preferred
was not statues but the bird in the statue's hair.”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros

“I do not live in you, I bear
my house inside me, everywhere

until your winters grow more kind
by the dancing firelight of mind

where knobs of brass do not exist
whose doors dissolve in tenderness

House that lets in, at last, those fears
that are its guests, to sit on chairs

feasts on their human faces, and
takes pity simply by the hand

shows her her room, and feels the hum
of wood and brick becoming home.”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros

“Your wanderer is a phantom from the boy's shore.

Mark you, he does not go; he sends his narrator;
he plays tricks with time because there are two journeys
in every odyssey, one on worried water,

the other crouched and motionless, without noise.
For both, the 'I' is a mast; a desk is a raft
for one, foaming with paper, and dipping the beak

of a pen in its foam, while an actual craft
carries the other to cities where people speak
a different language, or look at him differently,

while the sun rises from the other direction
with its unsettling shadows, but the right journey
is motionless; as the sea moves round an island

that appears to be moving, Jove moves round the heart
with encircling salt, and the slowly travelling hand
knows it returns to the port from which it must start.

Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you,
why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you:
to circle yourself and your island with this art.”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros

“Why couldn't they love the place, same way, together,
the way he always loved her, even with his sore?
Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather,

in sickness and in health, its beauty in being poor?
The way the leaves loved her, not like a pink leaflet
printed with slogans of black people fighting war?”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros

“These are the days when, however simple the future, we do not go
towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators
divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show

exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish woman
is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window
whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros

“History was fact,
History was a cannon, not a lizard; De Grasse

leaving Martinique, and Rodney crouching to act
in the right wind. Iounalo, my royal arse!
Hewanorra, my hole! Was the greatest battle

in naval history, which put the French to rout,
fought for a creature with a disposable tail
and elbows like a goalie?”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros

“সাগরই হচ্ছে সেই মহাকাব্য, যার সংস্পর্শে এলে আগের লেখা কবিতার প্রতিটি পংক্তি মুছে যায়, আবার নতুন করে সাগরের ফেনায় ফেনায় পংক্তিগুলো রচনা করার ইচ্ছা জাগে”
― Derek Walcott, Omeros