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Derek Walcott, Omeros:

Once the rains passed they took the olive Land Rover
round the shining island, up mornes with red smudges
of fresh immortelles with old things to discover;

the deep-green crescents held African villages
that, over centuries, had roofed their shacks with tins,
erected a square stone church, until by stages,

the shacks would creep down the ridges to become towns.
That was how History saw them. He studied the course that it offered: the broken roads, the clear rivers

that congealed to sepia lagoons, from which some case
of bilharzia would erupt in kids whose livers
caught the hookworm’s sickle. Pretty, dangerous streams.

Their past was flat as a postcard, and their future,
a brighter and flatter postcard, printed the schemes
of charters with their poverty-guaranteed tour.

I’ve finally found the right time for Omeros, I think, in these cold, dark, undisciplined city mornings, when the sensual heat of Walcott’s lush, unflinching gaze and (lovingly) strict form make it just a little easier to mistake my bundled morning-bus stuffiness for real warmth.