A far cry from Africa I feel that I in my own country must, under the threat of death, be separated from the Africa of my forebears, finish the orphan’s suturing of skin upon the winter of my will.

Borne on this earth, I live, I am man beneath the sorrow and the sun conscious of both, yet chosen, freely at home in the unnatural light where nature seizes me in her arms,

and unique in the dance of the root-branches, his two feet where I strike the ground are also the green cane of my voice, to answer earth in her own tongue. Windspeak, the grass stirring

to the core of its being knows the distance that binds a tree to its shadow, and does not care where I am but what also I must become.

• Derek Walcott