Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

DEREK WALCOTT, FIRST TO SEE THEM 343

Caribbean to Europe and pictured them lovingly, attentively enough to make
their New World—“the still pond and the egrets beating home”—a home now,
no exile any more.
The book’s beginning saw “a white herring gull over the Mission / droning
its passages from Exodus.” In the end,

This is my peace, my salt, exulting acre:

there is no more Exodus, this is my Zion,

whose couplets race the furrowing wind, their maker,

with those homecoming sails on the horizon.

And happily, standing opposite these lines, a Walcott seascape done years earlier
shows two tiny white sails on the horizon. Like the Native American prayer,
My words are tied in one/With the great mountains, Walcott ties couplets into
coastal waves, their poet into a homeland acre, and thus Sephardic / West Indian
exile into Zion. (plate 19)
Finally he speaks for humankind through Pissarro and himself, for “we, as
moving trees, must root somewhere.”