“ I carry a small white city in my head, one with its and grass, as the seaside city of graves expands its
avenues of withered flowers, with no sound of traffic acre and the only art left is the preparation of grace.
but the surf, no lights at dusk on the short street
where my brother and our mother live now at the one So, for my Hic Jacet, my own epitaph, “Here lies D.W.
address, so many are their neighbours! (p.51) This place is good to die in.” It really was. (p.19)
They have tried, without success, to “make room for And finally we come to lay to rest, our mentor and our
the accommodation of the dead/ their mounds that friend. In 87 years he had seen so many deaths, “the
multiply by the furrowing sea”(ibid.), for as the Mayor young deaths of others,/even of lean old men,
of Castries has said, in two years, Choc cemetery perpetually young” (Another Life, p.138) , had “dressed
will be laid to rest! But twenty years ago Derek had too early (once) for the funeral of this life/and saw
written his own epitaph. In Part Two Canto 1 of The them all, “as pilgrims of the night” (p..139). At eighty
Bounty, after bemoaning the death of so many of had felt the exasperation of urgency “Quick, quick,
his friends, he states : before they all die../ some of the best already
gone…/ I must clear the house of my head, I must
Now, so many deaths, nothing short of a massacre
make room/for a shrine before they all die”
from the wild scythe blindly flailing friends, flowers,
Derek sharing a joke with
George "Fish" Alphonse
& PABA