by Bond, Ruskin
What dreams were lost, I’ll never know.
It seemed the world’s last night had come
And there would never be a dawn.
Your touch soon swept the panting dark away—
Some suns are brighter by night than day!
4
Your eyes, glad and wondering,
Dwelt in mine,
And all that stood between us
Was a blade of grass
Shivering slightly
In the breath from our lips.
But grass will bend.
We turn and kiss,
And the world swings round,
The sky spins, the trees go hush
Hush, the mountain sings—
Though we must leave this place,
We’ve trapped forever
In the trembling air
The last sweet phantom kiss.
5
I know you’ll come when the cherries
Are ripe;
But it is still November
And I must wait
For the green fruit to blush
At your approach.
And meanwhile the tree is visited
By robber bands, masked mynas
And yellow birds with beaks like daggers,
Determined not to leave one cherry
Whole for lovers.
But still I wait, hoping one day
You’ll come to stain your lips
With cherry-juice, and climb my tree;
Bright goddess in dark green temple,
Thrusting your tongue at me.
6
Slender waisted, bright as a song,
Dark as the whistling-thrush at dawn,
Swift as the running days of November,
Lost like a dream too sweet to remember.
It Isn’t Time That’s Passing
Remember the long ago when we lay together
In a pain of tenderness and counted
Our dreams: long summer afternoons
When the whistling-thrush released
A deep sweet secret on the trembling air;
Blackbird on the wing, bird of the forest shadows,
Black rose in the long ago summer,
This was your song:
It isn’t time that’s passing by,
It is you and I.
Kites
Are you listening to me, boy?
I am only your kitemaker,
My poems are flimsy things
Torn by the wind, caught in mango trees,
Gay sport for boys and dreamers.
My silent songs. But once I fashioned
A kite like a violin,
She sang most mournfully, like the wind
In tall deodars.
Are you listening? Remember
The Dragon Kite I made one summer?
No, you are too young. A great
Kite, with small mirrors to catch the sun
And eyes and a tongue, and gold
Trappings and a trailing silver tail.
A kite for the gods to ride!
And it rose most sweetly, but the wind
Came up from nowhere,
A wind in waiting for us,
My twine snapped and the wind took the kite,
Took it over the flat roofs
And the waving trees and the river
And the blue hills for ever.
No one knew where it fell. Boy, are you
Listening? All my kites
Are torn, but for you I’ll make a bright
New poem to fly.
Cherry Tree
Eight years have passed
Since I placed my cherry seed in the grass.
‘Must have a tree of my own,’ I said—
And watered it once and went to bed
And forgot; but cherries have a way of growing
Though no one’s caring very much or knowing,
And suddenly that summer, near the end of May,
I found a tree had come to stay.
It was very small, a five months’ child,
Lost in the tall grass running wild.
Goats ate the leaves, grasscutter’s scythe
Split it apart, and a monsoon blight
Shrivelled the slender stem . . . Even so,
Next spring I watched three new shoots grow,
The young tree struggle, upwards thrust
Its arms in a fresh fierce lust
For light and air and sun.
I could only wait, as one
Who watches, wondering, while Time and the rain
Made a miracle from green growing pain . . .
I went away next year—
Spent a season in Kashmir—
Came back thinner, rather poor,
But richer by a cherry tree at my door.
Six feet high, my own dark cherry,
And—I could scarcely believe it—a berry,
Ripened and jewelled in the sun,
Hung from a branch—just one!
And next year there were blossoms, small
Pink, fragile, quick to fall
At the merest breath, the sleepiest breeze . . .
I lay on the grass, at ease,
Looked up through leaves, at the blue
Blind sky, at the finches as they flew
And flitted through the dappled green,
While bees in an ecstasy drank
Of nectar from each bloom, and the sun sank
Swiftly, and the stars turned in the sky,
And moon-moths and singing crickets and I—
Yes, I!—praised night and stars and trees:
A small, tall cherry grown by me.
Lovers Observed
Lovers lie drowsy in the grass,
Sunk in bracken, swimming in pools
Of late afternoon sunshine;
All agitation past, they stay totally
Absorbed in grass.
Green grass, and growing from that place
A sweep of languid arm still bare
But for a lost ladybird.
Anonymous lover brushes a dragon
Fly from his face.
Brief thunder blossoms in the air,
A leaf between the thighs is caught
And crushed. Love comes like a thief,
Crouching among the bruised and broken clover.
All flesh in grass.
Lone Fox Dancing
As I walked home last night
I saw a lone fox dancing
In the cold moonlight.
I stood and watched. Then
Took the low road, knowing
The night was his by right.
Sometimes, when words ring true,
I’m like a lone fox dancing
In the morning dew.
Secondhand Shop In Hill Station
The smell of secondhand goods
Is everywhere. Lost causes,
Lonely lives, and deaths in small cottages
Among the pines, meet here in the mildewed dark
Of his shop—Abdul Salaam, Proprietor.
Tales of a hundred failures
And ten hundred broken dreams.
A hat-pin and an Iron Cross
Lie down with a blackened pistol,
While a bronze Buddha smiles across
At a plastic doll from Bristol.
Old clothes, old books (perhaps a first edition?),
A dressing-gown, a dagger marked with rust.
A card for some lost Christmas,
And inside, a letter:
‘Dear Jane, I am getting better.’
A Chinese vase and a china-dog.
The shop is cold and thick with dust,
The Mall is far from Grand;
But Abdul Salaam grows prosperous,
In a suit that’s secondhand.
A Frog Screams
Standing near a mountain stream
I heard a sound like the creaking
Of a branch in the wind
.
It was a frog screaming
In the jaws of a long green snake.
I couldn’t bear that hideous cry.
And taking two sharp sticks,
I made the twisting snake disgorge the frog,
Who hopped quite spry out of the snake’s mouth
And sailed away on a floating log.
Pleased with the outcome,
I released the green grass-snake,
Stood back and spoke aloud:
‘Is this what it feels like to be God?’
‘Only what it’s like to be English,’
Said God (speaking for a change in French);
‘I would have let the snake finish his lunch!’
A Song For Lost Friends
The past is always with us, for it feeds the present . . .
1
As a boy I stood on the edge of the railway-cutting,
Outside the dark tunnel, my hands touching
The hot rails, waiting for them to tremble
At the coming of the noonday train.
The whistle of the engine hung on the forest’s silence.
Then out of the tunnel, a green-gold dragon
Came plunging, thundering past—
Out of the tunnel, out of the grinning dark.
And the train rolled on, every day
Hundreds of people coming or going or running away—
Goodbye, goodbye!
I haven’t seen you again, bright boy at the carriage window,
Waving to me, calling,
But I’ve loved you all these years and looked for you everywhere,
In cities and villages, beside the sea,
In the mountains, in crowds at distant places;
Returning always to the forest’s silence,
To watch the windows of some passing train . . .
2
My father took me by the hand and led me
Among the ruins of old forts and palaces.
We lived in a tent near the tomb of Humayun
Among old trees. Now multi-storeyed blocks
Rise from the plain—tomorrow’s ruins. . . .
You can explore them, my son, when the trees
Take over again and the thorn-apple grows
In empty windows. There were seven cities before. . . .
Nothing my father said could bring my mother home;
She had gone with another. He took me to the hills
In a small train, the engine having palpitations
As it toiled up the steep slopes peopled
With pines and rhododendrons. Through tunnels
To Simla. Boarding-school. He came to see me
In the holidays. We caught butterflies together.
‘Next year,’ he said, ‘when the War is over,
We’ll go to England.’ But wars are never over
And I have yet to go to England with my father.
He died that year
And I was dispatched to my mother and stepfather—
A long journey through a dark tunnel.
No one met me at the station. So I wandered
Round Dehra in a tonga, looking for a house
With lichi trees. She’d written to say there were lichis
In the garden.
But in Dehra all the houses had lichi trees,
The tonga-driver charged five rupees
for taking me back to the station.
They were looking for me on the platform:
‘We thought the train would be late as usual.’
It had arrived on time, upsetting everyone’s schedule.
In my new home I found a new baby in a new pram.
Your little brother, they said; which made me a hundred.
But he too was left behind with the servants
When my mother and Mr H went hunting
Or danced late at the casino, our only wartime night-club.
Tommies and Yanks scuffled drunk and disorderly
In a private war for the favours of stale women.
Lonely in the house with the servants and the child
And books I’d read twice and my father’s letters
Treasured secretly in the small trunk beneath my bed:
I wrote to him once but did not post the letter
For fear it might come back ‘Return to sender . . .’
One day I slipped into the guava orchard next door—
It really belonged to Seth Hari Kishore
Who’d gone to the Ganga on a pilgrimage—
The guavas were ripe and ready for boys to steal
(Always sweeter when stolen)
And a bare leg thrust at me as I climbed:
There’s only room for one,’ came a voice.
I looked up at a boy who had blackberry eyes
And guava juice on his chin, grabbed at him
And we both tumbled out of the tree
On to the ragged December grass. We rolled and fought
But not for long. A gardener came shouting,
And we broke and ran—over the gate and down the road
And across the fields and a dry river bed,
Into the shades of afternoon . . .
‘Why didn’t you run home?’ he said.
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘There’s no one there, my mother’s out.’
‘And mine’s at home.’
3
His mother was Burmese; his father
An English soldier killed in the War.
They were waiting for it to be over.
Every day, beyond the gardens, we loafed:
Time was suspended for a time.
On heavy wings, ringed pheasants rose
At our approach.
The fields were yellow with mustard,
Parrots wheeled in the sunshine, dipped and disappeared
Into the morning mist on the foothills.
We found a pool, fed by a freshet
Of cold spring water. ‘One day when we are men,’
He said, ‘We’ll meet here at the pool again.
Promise?’ ‘Promise,’ I said. And we took a pledge
In blood, nicking our fingers on a penknife
And pressing them to each other’s lips. Sweet salty kiss.
Late evening, past cowdust time, we trudged home:
He to his mother, I to my dinner.
One wining—dancing night I thought I’d stay out too.
We went to the pictures—Gone with the Wind—
A crashing bore for boys, and it finished late.
So I had dinner with them, and his mother said:
‘It’s past ten. You’d better stay the night.
But will they miss you?’
I did not answer but climbed into my friend’s bed—
I’d never slept with anyone before, except my father—
And when it grew cold, after midnight,
He put his arms around me and looped a leg
Over mine and it was nice that way
But I stayed awake with the niceness of it
My sleep stolen by his own deep slumber . . .
What dreams were lost, I’ll never know!
But next morning, just as we’d started breakfast,
A car drew up, and my parents, outraged,
Chastised me for staying out and hustled me home.
Breakfast unfinished. My friend unhappy. My pride wounded.
We met sometimes, but a constraint had grown upon us,
And the following month I heard he’d gone
To an orphanage in Kalimpong.
4
I remember you well, old banyan tree,
As you stood there spreading quietly
Over the broken wall.
While adults slept, I crept away
Down the broad veranda steps, around
The outhouse and the melon-ground. . . .
In that winter of long ago, I roamed
The faded garden of my mother’s hom
e.
I must have known that giants have few friends
(The great lurk shyly in their private dens),
And found you hidden by a thick green wall
Of aerial roots.
Intruder in your pillared den, I stood
And shyly touched your old and wizened wood,
And as my heart explored you, giant tree,
I heard you singing!
The spirit of the tree became my friend,
Took me to his silent throbbing heart
And taught me the value of stillness.
My first tutor; friend of the lonely.
And the second was the tonga-man
Whose pony-cart came rattling along the road
Under the furthest arch of the banyan tree.
Looking up, he waved his whip at me
And laughing, called, ‘Who lives up there?’
‘I do,’ I said.
And the next time he came along, he stopped the tonga
And asked me if I felt lonely in the tree.
‘Only sometimes,’ I said. ‘When the tree is thinking.’
‘I never think,’ he said. ‘You won’t feel lonely with me.’
And with a flick of the reins he rattled away,
With a promise he’d give me a ride someday.
And from him I learnt the value of promises kept.
5
From the tree to the tonga was an easy drop.
I fell into life. Bansi, tonga-driver,
Wore a yellow waistcoat and spat red
Betel-juice the entire width of the road.
‘I can spit further than any man,’ he claimed.
It is natural for a man to strive to excel
At something; he spat with authority.
When he took me for rides, he lost a fare.
That was his way. He once said, ‘If a girl
Wants five rupees for a fix, bargain like hell
And then give six.’
It was the secret of his failure, he claimed,
To give away more than he owned.
And to prove it, he borrowed my pocket-money
In order to buy a present for his mistress.
A man who fails well is better than one who succeeds badly.
The rattletrap tonga and the winding road
Through the valley, to the river-bed,
With the wind in my hair and the dust
Rising, and the dogs running and barking
And Bansi singing and shouting in my ear,