Antlered, stands
A silhouette to prick the eye:
Chilling as are hands
That lash up the drift, oh may I
Never be caught unaware,
Or cast off root, bole and bower,
When the touch falls on me.
Two others, written when winter had invested all with chill and the grip of ice, speak of –
The elm trees, still
Shaven bald and gaunt,
In the brief buba
They wear after the snow,
Are a band of alufa
Deployed down the neighbourhood
and ask of –
Snow,
Away
From my window
By the time of waking,
What deft, gentle hands spread
You over this bed
Of bile, while we slept? And say,
Nurse, when shall the corpse lie?
There, ding, dong, ding –
When all the world is a mushroom pie.
Spring, when it came, after all the clean shaving and sheathing that were autumn and winter, gave the impression of a bald person suddenly growing back his hair. And although the almost overnight burst of green springing out like one huge parasol all over the place made every true native heart exult, mine that was of the rain forests of Nigeria, where all the year round they never lose their colour, remained somewhat dampened of spirit. Rather, strange as it may sound, I missed the old dry colonial canals cutting through Princeton, especially at that season when dry leaves covered them up in rustling arms, and I also missed the bare, brown fields outside the gates which all through autumn into winter carried the look of dry, clotted blood, just as they must have looked when the Great George Washington stole up one gibberish Christmas night, and chopped up in their sleep on this very terrain the German sots and swine that were the royal army of George III. I even walked among the big, broken pillars left lying close by the grounds of the Graduate College. The old mansion, to which they had once offered support as well as pride, had already long been pulled down. But someone, too late, had then thought better of it and given orders that the columns should not be carted away but left lying there in sweet remembrance of things past. An ancient battlefield, and several huge fallen pillars: between them, they provide a fine heraldry and crest for Princeton.
2
Days with the Dailies
What becomes of the copy
Unused? The sheaves gathered more
In jest than sweat, and
Winnowed to the grain? Those facts
And figures, so carefully
Abstracted, dressed to a table
For consumption at breakfast
Or tea-time? The story
Turned into a tale,
Plain, tall or crooked, depending
To what end or floor
It was tracked – Does the copy
