CHAMAN LALL

It is thirty years since we two parted, It is thirty unswept, cobweb years Since, with a look of indifference, in a storm of elegance, Like some knowing, hungering bird, Like some forewarned, huckstering drone of a butterfly, Like a swift passion—she swept past my youth unhonied. And I am now a very old man—almost dead; I am now a very old ornament of lead; Weismann and Ellis, Burton I have read These thirty years in bed. This room; And the shadows lengthening on the lawn; And the distant boom, boom of the world; Wearisome watchings for the first star; And the toil, toil of the dawn: These have emptied my soul of its waves, These have made cold prisons of my faery caves, These have frosted The red, red poppy-leaf of time. Who now cares for my politics? Who now cares for my brilliant repartees That crushed one with an epigram, That struck one like an oriflamme? But now they ask me who I am. Once women came to me, And she, Once women came to me with their offerings Like long lines of brown bees Burdened with offerings, Like naked houris of turbaned Kings, Once——But now drifts Across the living-deadness Of an Egyptian desert My barren Arab way, My unflowered desert way. It is thirty years since we two parted, It is thirty unswept, cobweb years Since, with a look of indifference, in a storm of elegance, Like a swift passion—she swept past my youth unhonied. And I am now a very old man—almost dead; I am now a very old ornament of lead; Weismann and Ellis, Burton I have read These thirty years in bed.