In Derek Walcott's Omeros, the motif of the wound is as pervasive as it is ambivalent, from Philoctete’s festering sore, reminiscent of his ancestors’ bondage, to Major Plunkett’s war injury, and to the various traces of symbolic violence visible on the landscape of the island. Significantly, throughout the poem Maud Plunkett is engaged in stitching a quilt, suggesting the possibility of a healing closure at last. Drawing on the imagery of the wound, I explore the ways in which Omeros dramatises the dialectics of loss and regeneration. My contention is that the struggle for recovery is not just an allegory of the postcolonial condition, but a reflection on the poet’s attitude towards language. Thus, I suggest that Omeros elaborates a poetics of healing, which strives to move beyond petrified oppositions, and to release the self-resolving power of contradictions. It appears that the central locus of such regeneration is the sea, with its “self-healing coral”. But the Atlantic Ocean is also the site of an infinite play of trans-lations, which echoes the Renaissance ideal of a utopian cosmopolitanism, linking Walcott’s St Lucia to Joyce’s Ireland as well as Homer’s Mediterranean.