Georgian Poetry 1918-19

Author:Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-12-01T01:00:56.482729+00:00

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ROBERT NICHOLS

THE SPRIG OF LIME

He lay, and those who watched him were amazed

To see unheralded beneath the lids

Twin tears, new-gathered at the price of pain,

Start and at once run crookedly athwart

Cheeks channelled long by pain, never by tears.

So desolate too the sigh next uttered

They had wept also, but his great lips moved,

And bending down one heard, 'A sprig of lime;

Bring me a sprig of lime.' Whereat she stole

With dumb signs forth to pluck the thing he craved.

So lay he till a lime-twig had been snapped

From some still branch that swept the outer grass

Far from the silver pillar of the bole

Which mounting past the house's crusted roof

Split into massy limbs, crossed boughs, a maze

Of close-compacted intercontorted staffs

Bowered in foliage wherethrough the sun

Shot sudden showers of light or crystal spars

Or wavered in a green and vitreous flood.

And all the while in faint and fainter tones

Scarce audible on deepened evening's hush

He framed his curious and last request

For 'lime, a sprig of lime.' Her trembling hand

Closed his loose fingers on the awkward stem

Covered above with gentle heart-shaped leaves

And under dangling, pale as honey-wax,

Square clusters of sweet-scented starry flowers.

She laid his bent arm back upon his breast,

Then watched above white knuckles clenched in prayer.

He never moved. Only at last his eyes

Opened, then brightened in such avid gaze

She feared the coma mastered him again ...

But no; strange sobs rose chuckling in his throat,

A stranger ecstasy suffused the flesh

Of that just mask so sun-dried, gouged and old

Which few--too few!--had loved, too many feared.

'Father!' she cried; 'Father!'

He did not hear.

She knelt and kneeling drank the scent of limes,

Blown round the slow blind by a vesperal gust,

Till the room swam. So the lime-incense blew

Into her life as once it had in his,

Though how and when and with what ageless charge

Of sorrow and deep joy how could she know?

Sweet lime that often at the height of noon

Diffusing dizzy fragrance from your boughs,

Tasselled with blossoms more innumerable

Than the black bees, the uproar of whose toil

Filled your green vaults, winning such metheglyn

As clouds their sappy cells, distil, as once

Ye used, your sunniest emanations

Toward the window where a woman kneels--

She who within that room in childish hours

Lay through the lasting murmur of blanch'd noon

Behind the sultry blind, now full now flat,

Drinking anew of every odorous breath,

Supremely happy in her ignorance

Of Time that hastens hourly and of Death

Who need not haste. Scatter your fumes, O lime,

Loose from each hispid star of citron bloom,

Tangled beneath the labyrinthine boughs,

Cloud on such stinging cloud of exhalations

As reek of youth, fierce life and summer's prime,

Though hardly now shall he in that dusk room

Savour your sweetness, since the very sprig,

Profuse of blossom and of essences,

He smells not, who in a paltering hand

Clasps it laid close his peaked and gleaming face

Propped in the pillow. Breathe silent, lofty lime,

Your curfew secrets out in fervid scent

To the attendant shadows! Tinge the air

Of the midsummer night that now begins,

At an owl's oaring flight from dusk to dusk

And downward caper of the giddy bat

Hawking against the lustre of bare skies,

With something of

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