Two Ants climbed into the cup.
Who is going to sip first? That’s a prenup
A cup filled tea in a cup leftover
Mosquitoes are eyeing, staying hover.
Sipped by a human, the taste didn’t match
Let’s not swim in, start from the patch
the tea must be short of its gingerly nature,
or the flavours felt short, lost their stature.
The milk must
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thy happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen
Wrote a mother to her child:
Why do you say, I don’t understand,
I’ve brought you all way braving,
The scorching sun and blistering sand.
I have heard your heartbeats,
When none could see you in me,
I have felt your heartbeats,
Whenever you have felt lonely.
It has been called the last place on Earth
this equatorial wonderland,
land of roaring rivers and majestic mountains
beautiful, but so fragile – as a spider’s web.
Here elusive species gather together
on beaches, in forest depths and glades
as if they have something to say to each other –
and to us – about the risk of ecological ruin.
In
Good we must love, and must hate ill,
For ill is ill, and good good still ;
But there are things indifferent,
Which wee may neither hate, nor love,
But one, and then another prove,
As we shall find our fancy bent.
If then at first wise Nature had
Made women either good or bad,
Then some wee might hate, and
Elephant, death-bringer!
Elephant, spirit of the bush!
With his one hand he brings two trees to the ground.
If he had two hands, he would tear the sky like an
old rag.
Spirit who eat dog!
Spirit who eat ram!
Spirit who eats palm-fruit, thorns `and all!
With four pestle-legs he flattens the grass,
Where he walks, the grass cannot
One tree, another tree,
Each standing alone and erect.
The wind and air
Tell their distance apart.
But beneath the cover of earth
Their roots reach out
And at depths that cannot be seen
O Great Spirit,
You who in Your form of the Chapungu,
the great eagle with sharper eye than any aeroplane,
watches over us and knows all things;
who even descends from your great circles of flight
over our beautiful land of stone and earth and tree
to show a child lost in the bush
the way back to the village
By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule—
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE—Out of TIME.
Bottomless vales and boundless floods,
And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,
With forms
Your bliss is not my bliss
and yet perhaps
if I tell you my bliss
there may be a place
where we can meet
beyond words
My father
used to meet that small him
who was me
every afternoon from school
in the green park across from School
O God! who by Thy prophet’s hand
Didst smite the rocky brake,
Whence water came, at Thy command,
Thy people’s thirst to slake;
Strike, now, upon this granite wall,
Stern, obdurate, and high;
And let some drops of pity fall
For us who starve and die!
Ah! there exam days
when people near me,
they carefully hear me,
please me in many ways
Ah! there exam days.
My loneliness filled with girls and boys
my introvercy gone for joys,
This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves.
And last night the sapphire of the raccoon’s eyes in the beam of the flashlight.
He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal
Simmered in cider from the bottom of the
1.
Spirit here that reignest!
Spirit here that painest!
Spirit here that burneth!
Spirit here that mourneth!
Spirit! I bow
My forehead low,
Enshaded with thy pinions!
Spirit! I look
All passion struck,
Into thy pale dominions!
When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
When Nag, the wayside cobra, hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and
Where’s the Poet? show him! show him,
Muses nine! that I may know him.
‘Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan
Or any other wonderous thing
A man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato;
‘Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or Eagle, finds his way to
All
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit?
Heigho for a glass, heigho for a lass,
A drink and a kiss, I leave you;
Heigho for a friend that sticks till the end —
Good-bye, my lass, don’t you grieve you.
Hurrah for a song that is not too long,
With a jolly roaring chorus,
While our cans beat time to the ringing rhyme
Till the ceiling cracks up
CHOKED with ill weeds my garden lay a-dying,
Hard was the ground, no bud had heart to blow,
Yet shone your smile there, with your soft breath sighing:
‘Have patience, for some day the flowers will grow.’
Some weeds you killed, you made a plot and tilled it;
‘My plot,’ you said, ‘rich harvest yet shall give,’
With sun-warmed seeds of
I had a dove, and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
O, what could it grieve for? its feet were tied
With a single thread of my own hand’s weaving;
Sweet little red feet, why should you die–
Why should you leave me, sweet bird, why?
You lived alone in the forest tree,
Why,
