I have been re-reading Derek Walcott and realising how much I have loved his poetry. 
His work seems so immortally young. I remember when I was a schoolboy reading in the magazine BIM the poems “As John to Patmos” and “A City’s Death by Fire,” written when he was still in his teens, and knew – as I knew it also when I saw Frank Worrell late cut Lance Pierre at the Queen’s Park Oval – that here was genius.
“As John to Patmos, in each love- leaping air,
O slave, soldier, worker under red trees sleeping, hear
What I swear now, as John did:
To praise love long, the living and the brown dead.”
