Last thing, at dusk, I leaned out
the hotel window, like a seal sticking halfway
out of the concave comber it is riding.
To the west, the slopes of land offshore,
violet mist, like isles of the blest
seen by a child of genteel flogging,
and the water looked horizontal, a shining
scale balanced. First thing
in the morning, I leaned to the waist out into the
cold dawn, and rotated east
toward the rim of coastal mountain toothed
with sequoia and pine. And a crow cried out
in heavy vigor as he beat along
the face of the hotel, and when he came to me
he shied, going up on his hind legs
like a rearing stallion. All was in place—
the fitted box of the planet, the tiered
sewing-table town. And when the van rushed me down toward the
tideflats, the sun came over
the ridge to the east, its traditional direction,
as the parent, most of the time, dies
before the child. We passed the room
where she had breathed her last breath into
my mouth, I could not save it, I do not
know where it is—
not in space, but held, by the weight of our
natal stone, within our homemade
atmosphere. And we passed the cottage
with the cobalt window,
and I muttered what her children had shouted here, Blue
Window! Blue Window! Along the runway,
wind poured through the coat of horsetail
fur, and terns, in their skirts, fluttered
above the thumbnail and crochet-hook snails,
and we knock-swashed up, excreting fumes
of carbon fern and marrow—and in
the seat pocket, in front of me, were
crimped, furled buds, stems
bushy with fresh thorns,
and her last flagon of perfume, its glass
dove alighting to seize it, or lifting it up.
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Black-and-white head shot of Edward Kamau Brathwait
In Memory of Edward Kamau Brathwaite

"The Arrivants exemplified Brathwaite’s ambition to create a distinctively Caribbean form of poetry, which would celebrate Caribbean voices and language, as well as African and Caribbean rhythms evoking Ghanaian talking drums, calypso, reggae, jazz and blues. Brathwaite argued that the iambic pentameter embodied the British language and environment; it was not a meter that could carry the experience of hurricanes, slavery and a submerged African culture."

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Cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Sir Thomas Wyatt's The Complete Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
James Longenbach on Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me”

"I’ve never much cared if a poem is metered or not, rhymed or not, and I found the twentieth century’s transformation of these formal tools into weapons by and large distracting. All poems live or die in the concerted arrangement of syllables into patterns that are alternatively broken or reinforced. Wyatt taught me that." 
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