"The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut / Hatching / Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot."
— Walcott, Derek (b. 1930)
Author
Date
1965
Metaphor
"The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut / Hatching / Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot."
Metaphor in Context
Pleasures of an old man:
Morning: contemplative evacuation, considering
The dried leaf, nature's plan.
In the sun, the dog's feces
Crusts, whitens like coral.
We end in earth, from earth began.
In our own entrails, genesis.
If I listen I can hear the polyp build,
The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.
Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split.
Godlike, annihilating godhead, art
And self, I abandon
Dead metaphors: the almond's leaf-like heart,
The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut
Hatching
Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot,
That green wine bottle's gospel choked with sand,
Labelled, a wrecked ship,
Clenched sea-wood nailed and white as a man's hand.
Morning: contemplative evacuation, considering
The dried leaf, nature's plan.
In the sun, the dog's feces
Crusts, whitens like coral.
We end in earth, from earth began.
In our own entrails, genesis.
If I listen I can hear the polyp build,
The silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.
Cracking a sea-louse, I make thunder split.
Godlike, annihilating godhead, art
And self, I abandon
Dead metaphors: the almond's leaf-like heart,
The ripe brain rotting like a yellow nut
Hatching
Its babel of sea-lice, sandfly, and maggot,
That green wine bottle's gospel choked with sand,
Labelled, a wrecked ship,
Clenched sea-wood nailed and white as a man's hand.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Date of Entry
05/06/2013
