Sonal Shah

When you went how was it you carried with you/ My missal book of fine, flamboyant hours?
My book of turrets and of red-thorn bowers/ And skies of gold, and ladies in bright tissue?

Now underneath a blue-grey twilight, heaped/ Beyond the withering snow of the shorn fields
Stands rubble of stunted houses; all is reaped/ And garnered that the golden daylight yields.

Dim lamps like yellow poppies glimmer among/ The shadowy stubble of the under-dusk,
As farther off the scythe of night is swung,/ And little stars come rolling from their husk.

And all the earth is gone into a dust/ Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold,
Covered with aged lichens, past with must,/ And all the sky has withered and gone cold.

And so I sit and scan the book of grey,/ Feeling the shadows like a blind man reading,
All fearful lest I find the last words bleeding/ With wounds of sunset and the dying day.

"Grey Evening"

From Amores, by DH Lawrence