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What the Twilight Says
By Ira Mathur
One pre-carnival evening, in the early 1990s, under a livid sky of hot rouge rimmed with orange, with the sounds of steel pan and David Rudder sweeping the Savannah—its yet unpaved dust unsettled by a thousand feet—I first met Derek Walcott. In all that confusion, with the darkness underfoot, I stumbled, almost eyeballing a tall, sexy (red man first, poet after) Poet Laureate with a powerful voice, of the mythical proportions he mastered and executed in his epic “Omeros,” (an audacious rewriting of Greek myth, carving in Caribbean stone our landscape, mouthing our voice, giving our region greater authenticity than any independence movement has). The encounter must have lasted thirty seconds, not long enough to warrant an exaggerated retelling of my brush with greatness.... read more>> |
