Derek Walcott's "Christmas Eve iii"

Remember childhood? Remember a faraway train?
Yesterday I wrote a letter and tore it up. Clouds carried bits under the hills
like gulls through the steam of the valley to Port of Spain;
then my eyes began to brim from all the old hills
as I lay face-up in bed, muffling the thunder
of a clouded heart while the hills dissolved in ruin.
This is how the rain descends into Santa Cruz,
with wet cheeks, with the far sound of a river, and surging grass,
the mountains loaded as the clouds that have one bright
fissure that closes into smoke, and things returning to fable
and rumour and the way it was once, it was like this once...
Remember the small red berries shaped like a bell
by the road bushes, and a church at the end of innocence,
and the sound of la riviére Dorée, through the trees to Choiseul,
the scent of hog plums that I have never smelled since,
the long-shadowed emptiness of small roads, when singed smell rose
from the drizzling asphalt, the way rain hazes the chapel
of La Divina Pastora, and a life of incredible errors?

On a whim I took this book of poetry (The Bounty) with me to Sweden, and I've not regret the extra baggage whatsoever. I had forgotten the power of reverie that had originally found there. This "Christmas Eve" series in particular tugs at my heart with it's cry back in time to innocence and the effects of time on us all.

These themes never let me go, and I guess, to come extent, me them, too. Innocence like a ball and chain that I wish to carry along, even if it hadn't been been shackled to me. Time drawing me onward like the frames of a film, hardly noticeable, but continually chugging us along in life. All burned through with the light that makes us and breaks us up in the end. Growing, yet decomposing: the truth itself.

And all we can do is make the best of it.