Daily Inspiration Quote by Derek Walcott

A wound speaks in metaphors because ordinary language can’t hold what’s missing. Walcott’s image turns memory into a kind of phantom anatomy: not a tidy scrapbook of the past, but an amputated limb still aching for the “centre” it once belonged to. The verb “yearns” matters. This isn’t nostalgia as leisure activity; it’s a physiological pull, an ache with direction, insisting that the self once had a coherence history has interrupted.

The severed limb is also a political geography. In Walcott’s Caribbean imagination, “centre” carries the pressure of empire: the metropole that positioned itself as the body, the colony as an appendage. The subtext is brutal: to be cut off is not to be freed, necessarily, but to be forced into a permanent argument with origin and authority. Memory becomes a damaged compass, pointing toward a home that may be real, mythic, or imposed.

Then the line swerves into the uncanny: “those bamboo thighs of the god.” Bamboo suggests something both organic and fabricated, natural and jointed, a body rebuilt from materials that don’t quite match flesh. Walcott fuses classical “god” imagery with tropical matter, staging his signature act of cultural remixing. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the old canon: the divine body itself is patched, hybrid, carpentered from elsewhere. The intent isn’t to romanticize fragmentation but to show how postcolonial identity survives it - by making new myth out of splinters, and admitting the ache never entirely goes away.