Derek Walcott - From this far lyrics

The white almonds of a statue stare at almond branches wrestling off their shade like a girl from her dress--a gesture rarely made by abstract stone. A Greek tanker pa**es through the net of branches to the drag of tractors quarrying a cliff-- in its hold, a cargo of marble heads; from Orpheus to Ona**is, the sea has flown one flag: white-barred waves on unalterable blue. The sky's window rattles at gears raked into reverse; but no stone head rolls in the ochre dust, in the soil of our islands no gods are buried. They were shipped to us, Seferis, dead on arrival. Dawn buckles on the helmet of raid Agamemnon. A net is flung over the shallows; ocean divides: a bronze door. In the wash the trunks of warriors roll and recede. Great lines, Seferis, have heaved them this far. At dusk, the man-god bleeds face down in the veins of the sea. The blue night hums with bees. Every hour bores a hole in hive of the labyrinth, at whose end the obscene miscegenation lowers its lyre-curved horns, and whether it is for dead stones, or the god of thorns, we stagger the arena with leaking eyes. The almonds hoard their shadows as we do the shades of friends. When a bronze leaf glints, I hear again the torn throat in the torn shade, then my eyes harden in a stone head. I see them in a colonnade of concrete wharf-piles where a gull settles. I hear them groaning with the tractors. I am eating an ice cream on a hot esplanade, in a barred blue and white vest, in the brittle shade of a sea grape, in the iodine reek of shallows, watching the empty bleu port frothing with yachts, when a leafy wall tosses the shadow of a pawing bull. The fairy boat pa**es, and the gull screeches its message, opening its wings like a letter, and the screech grows into a whirlwind of shawled and ragged crows in a stone field. It is during this, Seferis, that a girl wrestling off her dress fold with the wave like a dolphin, that surf hides the sobbing of women, that, in the thudding of tractors, i hear the wooden clocks behind the hills arena, and the dry wrenching of the hunting dogs. Over something-carrion, the sun's wave buried king vultures with ragged shawls keep circling; i see the harpist with his eyes like clouds i remember you holding a heavy marble head; i see the other who invited the barbarians into the white washed streets. I stay with my own. I starved my hand of names, no tan fauns leapt over my wrist, I'll never see Peireas repeat her white name in water, but whether my eyes will be white seeds in a bust, or, likelier, the salt fruit of warms, they are sockets whose hollows boast those flashes of inward life, from the heads thunder-lit storms.