Moon
by Derek Walcott
Resisting poetry I am becoming a poem.
O lolling Orphic head silently howling,
my own head rises from its surf of cloud.
Slowly my body grows a single sound,
slowly I become
a bell,
an oval, disembodied vowel,
I grow, an owl,
an aureole, white fire.
I watch the moonstruck image of the moon burn,
a candle mesmerized by its own aura,
and turn
my hot, congealing face, towards that forked mountain
which wedges the drowned singer.
That frozen glare,
that morsured, classic petrifaction.
Haven't you sworn off such poems for this year,
and no more on the moon?
Why are you gripped by demons of inaction?
Whose silence shrieks so soon?
"Morsured," by the way, is an archaic word meaning bitten.
