Walcott and the poetry of cigarette

Time out for poetry.

I can't recall where I came across Derek Walcott first. Or maybe, I do. Lia. In a garden. A clump of poets, writers and one wannabe. Tita. Who was not there. Who was spoken of. For having said she cannot write anymore since she stopped chain-smoking. Hahaha. Lia said. Me too. She had to stop smoking for a long long while. Someone so finnicky made her so. Traitor. As though that was a bad thing. She was in Derek Walcott's class, she said. In Boston. It was for Derek Walcott that she went to Boston. Or chose Boston U out of so many. Great poet. A Tobagan. Lord, I don't know how do you call someone who hails from Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidadian and Tobagonian? Eeeee. But in his class, Lia said, they had to sit through all that chain-smoking in that air-conditioned classroom. Hahaha. But no one was laughing. Only Lia. You don't know how to appreciate the poetry of cigarette, he used to tell his class. But Walcott, she said, is no longer in Boston U. He went back home to Trinidad, probably. Where maybe there is no smoking ban hahaha. Lia didn't say that. And Lia didn't laugh. She also didn't say that Walcott retired. I think poets don't ever retire. Maybe he only went out for a long cigarette break.


LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.