XXI

Our love is like a Japan print, you think,

Rare mulberry-paper one, like gold that’s dead?

Foreground a garden, kiosk-canopièd

O’er moon-eyed, magic flowers of black and pink;

Curved, quaint-bridged river; temple on the brink

Where lidless eyed sits Buddah unwearièd,

Dreaming that time is naught, the now even sped.

To westward over all black bird-dots sink.

Background, a fairy sea of dreamland blue

Whence mountains rise that surely once we knew

In some dim other life too sweet for words.

Aye! Aye! our Love-Land! But those black, black birds—

Too like they are to monks who hovered where

That old Greek garden of the world was fair.