A Sea Change (22)
(from "White Egrets)

May my enemy be assuaged by these waves because they are beautiful even to his evil, may the drizzle be a benediction to his heart even as it is to mine; they say here that the devil is beating his wife when the sun shines through the wires of fine, fine rain. It is not my heart that forgives my enemy his obscene material desires but the flare of a leaf, the dart of a mottled dove, the processional surplices of breakers entering the cove as penitents enter the dome to the lace of an altar; beauty so shaping neither condemns nor saves like the tenets of my enemy’s church, the basilicas of tumbling cherubs and agonized saints and riots of purpureal cloud; though I have cause I will share the world’s beauty with my enemies even though their greed destroys the innocence of my Adamic island. My enemy is a serpent as much as he is in a fresco, and he in all his scales and venom and glittering head is part of the island’s beauty; he need not repent.

Derek Walcott is a writer and painter from the Caribbean island of St.
Lucia.  He was born in 1930. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1992. This is his poem #22 under “A Sea Change” in his latest volume of
poetry, titled White Egrets (2010).

Source: AGNI OnLine