Â鶹ԼÅÄ

Derek Walcott has won the 2010 TS Eliot Prize for Poetry with "White Egrets". The St Lucia based poet wasn't at the prize giving ceremony earlier this evening in London to pick up the £15,000 prize. He'sÌýback home in the Caribbean. Among the prestigious bunch of poets he beat this year, his close friend Seamus Heaney with hisÌýlatest collection "Human Chain". Heaney and the others all get £1000 but IÌýknow Heaney will raise of glass of rum in his pal's honour tonight, not for the money but the bonds of friendship which have endured across the world and the years.Ìý Here's just one of the beautiful poems in Walcott's new collection courtesy of Faber and Faber.

‘Sixty Years After’
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý
In my wheelchair in the Virgin lounge at Vieuxfort,
I saw, sitting in her own wheelchair, her beauty
hunched like a crumpled flower, the one whom I thought
as the fire of my young life would do her duty
to be golden and beautiful and young forever
even as I aged. She was treble-chinned, old, her devastating
smile was netted in wrinkles, but I felt the fever
briefly returning as we sat there, crippled, hating
time and the lie of general pleasantries.
Small waves still break against the small stone pier
where a boatman left me in the orange peace
of dusk, a half-century ago, maybe happier
being erect, she like a deer in her shyness, I stalking
an impossible consummation; those who knew us
knew we would never be together, at least, not walking.
Now the silent knives from the intercom went through us.

• This poem is from White Egrets by Derek Walcott, published by Faber & Faber.