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Speak softly, let me sit and, dreaming, see.

In Baghdad

GREEN

Green melons

Round

Oblong

Numbers piled up

Green and round …

Innocent round melons saying nothing,

Nothing at all.

In the corner there are melons gashed and split

With naked pink flesh

And thousands of flies settling on them.

Thousands of flies

Ugh!

God sees the world like a round green melon,

And then he sees the flies

Buzzing and settling …

But, being merciful,

He looks away and says,

“I will try not to think of these human beings …”

Allah is very merciful.

An Island

I HAVE sat dreaming in a quiet place …

The green leaves met above my head,

A river rustled in its bed,

And all around

Was sweet and stealthy woodland sound.

Such was a bower within the wood

To fit a hidden secret mood …

And yet my eyes looked out and saw

Not the dark sweetness of the wood

But far off misty hills of blue

Seen from a hillside where there grew

Genista flowers and Iris white

(Do you remember our delight?)

And from that hillside where we lay

On that thrice blessed halcyon day

We saw—above all mortal ills

The misty everlasting hills …

“I will lift up mine eyes and see—”

And dream that you are there with me.

The Nile

DO you remember water like molten silver gleaming?

And white sails that crept slowly past?

Stealthily, silently, as though they knew

They might disturb our sweet enchanted dreaming …

My heart, that night, was silent too

Or did it stir? Stir and awake from its long dreaming?

It was so quiet that I scarcely knew …

I only know next morn the sands were golden

And that day broke for us alone.

It came and brought us joy—and now is gone.

But there remain in that enchanted land

Our footprints in the golden endless sand …

Dartmoor

I SHALL not return again the way I came,

Back to the quiet country where the hills

Are purple in the evenings, and the tors

Are grey and quiet, and the tall standing stones

Lead out across the moorland till they end

At water’s edge.

It is too gentle, all that land,

It will bring back

Such quiet dear remembered things,

There, where the longstone lifts its lonely head,

Gaunt, grey, forbidding,

Ageless, however worn away;

There, even, grows the heather …

Tender, kind,

The little streams are busy in the valleys,

The rivers meet by the grey Druid bridge,

So quiet,

So quiet,

Not as death is quiet, but as life can be quiet

When it is sweet.

To a Cedar Tree

DO you remember Lebanon?

The stillness and the snows?

The cool cold glare

And a blue sky—pitiless—

Or sometimes grey and heavy with unfallen snow?

In the summers that were of polished brown hills

(But always the stillness—the mountain tops)

Here Solomon’s men came to hew and fell the cedars

And the trees were taken to stand

Proudly in the temple of God …

But they had been nearer to God,

Had lived with God in the hills,

Had whispered to God in the stillness;

They had been proud then and unafraid.

And you, my Cedar tree, in my garden by the Thames,

Brought in a ship and planted in a strange land

Near to the river

With farm lands all around,

Close to the toil and the labour of men,

Stately you grew, your branches wide,

Gracious you stand

With smooth clipped lawn all around you

And an English herbaceous border

Flaunting its bloom on a summer’s day.

You are a part of England now:

“Tea will be served on the lawn

Under the Cedar tree.”

But do you remember Lebanon?

Beloved tree—do you remember Lebanon?

Calvary

ON Calvary, in midday’s burning heat,

What thoughts in Mary’s heart, as pale she stands?

What echoed words, remembered words, that beat

From out the past, and make her