Dream-Figures in Sunlight

Why buy Bret Harte, I asked, when I was prepared to supply home-grown fiction on the hoof?

—RUDYARD KIPLING, Something of Myself

I wake up in the city where Kipling lived,

Fell in love and wrote plain tales,

Where Hsiuan-tsang in the seventh century

Saw mortal pilgrims making death leaps

From an undying tree. The rampart stands,

The Ganges flows below, and nothing changes

In a hinterland whose dead-end streets

Have seldom known raiders. A hundred, a thousand

Years from now, may the sap-filled bough

Still print its shadow on running water,

And a dusty March wind blow its leaves

Towards a page of Kipling, a home-grown page.