The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.

I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

How can I turn from Africa and live?

The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.

The English language is nobody's special property.