  THERE beauty’s footsteps lingered in the soft And poignant semitones that sped aloft, In perfumes wavering with finger-tips So faint, they scarcely fluttered on the lips. There caravans would halt in flame of day And many turbaned wanderers would stray To cool their brown-limbed bodies in the deep And juicy foam of fountains, where would leap Eternal jets of water-diamonds Limned intricate like myriad leafy fronds, Wetting the marble rims with amber showers Throughout the endless ballet of the hours.... There Bedouins with liquid amorous eyes Would listen to the piercing notes arise From shrilly-vivid parokeets, or pause To overhear the chattering macaws And watch the cranes with slender, supple necks Preening the feathered shadows into flecks Of purpled hues and finest, mordant white, Or spy the swans ascend in snowy flight Over the swinging canopy of leaves; Whither the sky suavely interweaves A labyrinth of azure-rifted clouds. Where saffron-throated birds in whirring crowds Would weep celestial music with their wings, And tawny monkeys, tiny nimble things, Would play their melodramas in the trees, And throbbing swarms of honey-sucking bees Vibrate the petalled air in droning waves, And mingle with the murmuring of slaves. When shadow night is poisoned by the fangs Of daily death, with new redoubled pangs She crackles up in films of aËry haze, Until the reeling sun with outworn rays Is hacked to slivers and his regal veins Spurt crimson jets of flame along the plains, Suffused to blazing chaos when the sky Writhes into darkness and her empery. Then throb the pensile gardens to a swoon, The great rose-yellow petal of the moon Curved, white and hovering above the trees, Shivers a gelid lucency to freeze The gold of sunset into coldest hues— A monochrome of silver-tinted blues. God’s pyrotechnics, shooting star cascades Splash, sliding, sizzling, ever-whirling blades Or cataracts and dagger jerks of light In infinite gyrations down the night. The hump-backed camels, roding lupanars Of clouds that lust enamoured of the stars, Shimmering jewelled pinpricks wistfully Awed by the vastness and the mystery Wrapped palpitating round. Then fold on fold The shoulders of the hills are outlined bold With pallid smoothness, undulating far To where the empty, trackless deserts are. |
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