The air cool and soft,
The darkness early about this sorrow, I
Am alone awake, I am alone
To watch the trembling of so many tears
Above my hard and empty lands. The plain
Mutilated and scarified, with dust and ashes on a black face
Looks brittle as a moth’s wing. Shall I weep?
The cattle had been gathered in the village, the leader
Bellowed on two dull notes, when
Passing a poor woman’s hut I sniffed her hearth of curds and embers,
At dusk under the grey smoke of a dung-fire.
I heard her call her babes to supper and saw
The too-big-bellied urchins
Come clustering to the porridge-pot. And I thought
‘You have done well for yourself,
But it is not very long
Since you would run weeping home because of the thunder,
When the storm threw the old trees on their chins.’
Often night lets down darknesses upon me,
And every kind of doubt to weigh upon me. Then
I have said to him, as he thrust out his breast,
As he leapt forward like a pitch-black bullock,
As he buttocked with his buttocks,
I have said ‘Night,
Are you not coming to an end because of dawn?’
And he murmurs back, the night,
I have wandered out in the thin tang of white stars
While my friends were asleep below the hills.
Depending only on rumours of my starry meals,
It was not for them to know how far my gaze was set.
There would come up many idle men to sit with the strangers
And sit down at our side. How they puffed off their words!
They would ask us what ancestry we were of;
We would tell them that, and tell them
How for our ancestors we set apart
A bit of a broken pot, or a forked stick
It might be, in the hut, or a little shrine
As who should say, a set of stones
Carefully selected, with a tree growing up in the middle:
Or how there might be a special sacred tree or grove of trees,
Or finally there might be a true tomb
Used as a temple.
The variations might be innumerable,
But there would be always remembrance,
It would be always as we said,
Although the manner of our remembrance varied:
There might be libations of beer,
There might be gifts on those altars
Of all that men use for food;
There might be prayers and appeals from those in trouble.
And they replied, and they said
‘We think well of these men,
Who it seems will be far off on some high place
Perhaps, by the day dawning.’
And they made us sit down again
To hear again how we reverenced the dead,
And filled up our pipes with sweet herbs
Although they had not half enough for themselves.
But now the old men and the infirm have been well killed;
Now there are spies who crawl back from the south
Bearing on cheeks and shanks the sores
Of a new sickness. They will be burned. And there are captains
Who have returned from failure, to be hanged.
And my singing messengers have taxed the coast,
My soldiers weep with hurry at my commands:
They go out to slay, they return at night weary of slaughter,
They advance and attack and outflank and flee, all at once.
And on the most desirable of my hills,
In the sweetest of fastnesses, I speak well of them.
And I have divided the captives, allotted them ranks.
From time to time thus I established
Twenty-five regiments.
Some wear a headdress of otter-skin, others of leopard-skin,
The wing-feathers of the eagle or the ostrich
Are commonly added to these,
But the red wing-feathers of the green lory
Are worn only by royal grant.
And I have given them names,
Called my regiments Decoys,
Slashers, Gluttons or else Bees,
Ambushes, Mountains, the Blue Haze:
So we had too a name in the world
And war was our host in these places (there was blood in the dregs of the cup).
And so with white or black ox-tails, kilts of leopard-skin
And the broad shields of stretched cow-hide,
White or brown with a crimson or with a black spot,
They went out. So my state
Was fanned by a frond of fern, and in the red shadow
Of cloud-like trees I was repaid.
Among gossip of moist leaves, tongues of an upstart court,
To my gaudy establishment as general
Many emissaries, bitter, brought the crane’s feather,
And offered many tokens to placate, including
Sea-shells and a quantity of melons.
The eyelid severed from its terrible schemes
Is reproached by a leafage built of numberless small flames;
Tenderness is peculiarly active
In the first days of spring weather.
The province is all astir with fronds and buds,
And when one walks out in the meadows a sweet steam
Floats up beneath one’s foot. A scarlet tree
Lit by the late wet season to her tips,
Sways and offers to the man who sways a scarlet crown;
And shakily a man’s mind
Controls its longing to be spilt,
A couple of dew-drops lying
In the hollow of a leaf.
So a man may be slain for his eminence in dancing,
When the plain is alive with hair-like flowers!
And at last there will be something to be said
That I have made my own.
I have brought fear to this people,
I have rendered them as rich and smooth as ox-blood:
But am I a bird of prey, that I pursue
Only after the scent of a carcass? I might say
How with my lust I have refreshed the laws,
Giving out orders to hoe; and in the autumn
How some were allotted new wives;
How after my hunting they passed many hot days
Tossing the meat the one to the other
And laughing at the fat that hung in tassels.
The condemnation of the warriors at an end,
Those who might die with the chief I kissed on the breast and dismissed.
And there were the high days of the mind, the days of high feasting,
There were the feast days when, bare as a bolt
I danced before the people: as, on a dumb waste of green grasses
And lilies tangled like a sheep’s wet back,
When the dawn’s light was snowy in the sky and underfoot,
Light bubbled up and trickled to my foot. And on an evening
Wreathed with fond hues when the red rock
Smoked with a soft flame it had sucked,
And when the washed air with that flush
Was burdened, I might have cried I was puffed up
With gross and fanciful enjoyments. Holidays
When on the smooth floor of a public place
As if in the teeth of all things I would act
As thunder, commandeer an echoing tube
And a congratulatory drum. And there were days
When the young sky was like a lake, but softer,
And to my voice, to purify the army,
The rivers once down, to depart in the dust
Of a perfumed month, a month
Of pollen, we devised a long dance before bathing.
Wings rise, the shrubs flutter.
I have bathed in this solitary water,
And by the pool beside the flowering thorn
I turn a question over in my hands.
And in the opinion of this palest empty dawn
When a couple of birds to mock are making apart a single song,
Which of us can forgive himself? for all are,
The song says, guilty of all.
The odour of journeys mingles with despair.
If the branches of the sweet-thorn are all broken,
They have been broken for our sins. Yet everywhere
The sweet-thorn with an odour
Of honey pains the deep waste of this hour of penitence.
The male bird gives a whistle,
And his companion caps it like a bell;
And there is only this, that we are worthy.
Such were the gifts inflicted upon us who trembled
At their brilliance. And a sharp rain
Having poured, we stretch ourselves in the sun to heal.
The hills are like old men sitting in their blankets,
The wild things are gay. Buck jumps, hawk dives.
And at the tip of that peak, like a knot
Of white spittle in a brown pool, see, that cloud
Softly clinches peace. The deepest colour,
The most mysterious, that of our flesh, tells
We have eaten luminous shadows. We smoke hemp,
And the conversation of some swallows is both a keen burden
And sweeter than that of the dead. And the foot-hills grow rosy;
A leopard-skin is trodden beside the enraptured river,
And stretched on the glossy backs of boulders. The woman is panting,
Her dugs hang forward as she leans; as for her daughter,
She is light and dreadful as a spear, she too leaves a gash.
We clap our hands together. What do you dance,
What do you dance? we ask. We clap hands. How
Is it one sings your king’s name? We have dreamed
Of an adorable authority, and the brooks
Sobbing absurdly in the bright morning, the brooks
Glitter. There is so often news,
Yet we listen for news of the Men of the Sun, and of the Mist,
We murmur against the Men of the Baboons and those of the Showers,
We learn of the Men of the Little Bluebuck, the Men of the Young Lions,
Of the Sons of the Dancers of Iron, and of the Children
Of the Elephant. All these are ours,
And we are the People of Heaven. Tell us no lies