Christmas

A Hymn on the Nativity of My Savior
Ben Jonson

I sing the birth was born tonight,
The Author both of life and light;
The angels so did sound it,
And like the ravished shepherds said,
Who saw the light, and were afraid,
Yet searched, and true they found it.

The Son of God, the eternal King,
That did us all salvation bring,
And freed the soul from danger;
He whom the whole world could not take,
The Word, which heaven and earth did make,
Was now laid in a manger.

The Father's wisdom willed it so,
The Son's obedience knew no "No,"
Both wills were in one stature;
And as that wisdom had decreed,
The Word was now made Flesh indeed,
And took on Him our nature.

What comfort by Him do we win?
Who made Himself the Prince of sin,
To make us heirs of glory?
To see this Babe, all innocence,
A Martyr born in our defense,
Can man forget this story?

In Bimini, without a haze...

We've decided to take a (temporary) break from our Poet of the week feature in order to concentrate on excerpts from chapbooks, anthologies and other poetry books that grab our attention.

Today we've got an excerpt from Derek Walcott's brand-new book, The Prodigal. On one level, it's a travel narrative, a series of collisions between the culture of Walcott's home island of Saint Lucia and that of Europe and Latin America. It's also a personal meditation on old age.

The following is taken from one of Walcott's St. Lucia sections.

Part III, 17, IV

You never think of January as a stormy month,
but the African wind blows rain across the cape,
the combers come in fast and their high surf
explodes irregularly along the Causeway.
It is the season of rainbows, of a thin drizzle
in the wet air; so many, their backs arch
like radiant dolphins, they leap over the hills
above the villages, profuse with benediction,
over the hissing sea and the small fine roads
and the indigo ranges heavy with the darkening rain.
But now, even farther north, in Bimini,
it would be clearer, finer, without a haze
over the lime-green shallows and the violet reefs
and the dark chasms full of wavering reeds,
and the abyss of my deep cowardice,
my fears and treacheries in an old age
foam-crested with conspiratorial murmurings
subliminal, submarine, when my ageing prayer
is, hooked to this craft, to break clear of the nets
to shudder like a great convulsive marlin
into heaven and fall crashing and leap again
scattering prisms and led by veering dolphins
vault for the last time breaking free of the line.

From The Prodigal, copyright © 2004 by Derek Walcott. Published by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.

Other places:

More on Derek Walcott (including an audio clip) at The Academy of American Poets.

Writing = home

We just found out about the late Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali and are planning to corral as many of his books as we can, in hopes of making him a featured poet. In the meantime, here's a sample...

Stationery
Agha Shahid Ali

The moon did not become the sun.

It just fell on the desert

in great sheets, reams

of silver handmade by you.

The night is your cottage industry now,

the day is your brisk emporium.

The world is full of paper.

Write to me.


Other places:

A bio., poems and links at The Academy of American Poets.

Agha Shahid Ali on the ghazal (a form of poetry at which he excelled) and more, on Slate.

Much more (including an interview, articles and poems) at Norton Poets Online.

A tribute, Remembering Shahid, by Rafiq Kathwari.