" A Map of Europe"

Like Leonardo's idea
Where landscapes open on a waterdrop
Or dragons crouch in stains,
My flaking wall, in the bright air,
Maps Europe with its veins.

On its limned window ledge
A beer can's gilded rim gleams like
Evening along a Canaletto lake,
Or like that rocky hermitage
Where, in his cell of light, haggard Jerome
Prays that His Kingdom come
To the far city.

The light creates its stillness. In its ring
Everything IS. A cracked coffee cup,
A broken loaf, a dented urn decome
Themselves, as in Chardin,
Or in beer-bright Vermeer,
Not objects of our pity.

In it is no lacrimae rerum,
No art. Only the gift
To see things as they are, halved by a darkness
From wich they cannot shift.

Derek Walcott, "Poems 1965-1980", Jonathan Cape,
London, 1992, p 36.
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