Right now, I am one of the proudest Saint Lucians out there. According to many media houses, Barack Obama was spotted carrying a book of poems by St. Lucia’s very own Derek Walcott. Also, it is reported that Derek Walcott wrote a poem for Barack Obama, following his victory in the US Elections.

President Elect Barack Obama may be busy assembling his transition team and meeting with economic advisers to discuss healing the blighted US economy. But it appears he still has time for a little poetry.

Three days after winning the presidential election, Barack Obama was spotted in Chicago carrying a book of poems by Derek Walcott, the West Indies Nobel laureate.

The Illinois senator was photographed holding the new-looking book, perhaps a gift he had just received, and reading a letter as he headed to his car with his wife, Michelle.

The 500-page volume, Collected Poems 1948-1984, is one of 20 collections by the poet, theatre director and playwright, who has also written more than 20 plays.

Walcott, who won the 1992 Nobel prize for Literature, is often described as the West Indies’ greatest writer and intellectual. He was born in St Lucia in 1930 and is best known for his epic poem Omeros, a reworking of the story of the Odyssey in a 20th century Caribbean setting.

Collected Poems 1948-1984 includes selections from all of Walcott’s previous seven books of verse, including the full text of Another Life, his 1974 autobiographical poem.

Source: Telegraph News

Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama from Nobel winner Derek Walcott
The West Indies poet Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, writes exclusively for The Times to mark the election of Barack Obama as President.

Forty Acres
Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —

a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,

an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd

dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,

parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked

cotton

forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens

that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten

cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is

a tense

court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s

receding rim —

a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.

The small plough continues on this lined page

beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s

black vengeance,

and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,

heart, muscles, tendons,

till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure

light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

Source: Times Online