Cock-crowing

A cock crew, and the morning was still cool

(the tropic sun has waned

a little towards winter, we have gained
some respite from the torture of the flames
and the full measure of the summer’s heat

the dull insistent beat

that numbs the brain and dries the senses up
and saps our thin reserves of northern strength).
There was a little mist between the trees
and on the grass a silvered hint of dew—

and then the loud cock crew

a broken burst of harsh crescendo notes.

Oh so dear dissonance
destroying all distance!

I was no more in India, once again
I saw the straw, and smelt the friendly dung
of English farmyards, felt beneath my feet
the deadened tread of mud-caked boots on chaff,

where dusty sun-shafts pour

between the high grey tie-beams to the floor
in the owl-haunted barn among the downs
and there’s a faint sharp smell of hay, and iron,
old oil from tractors and tarred binder-twine
while through wide doors, wide ploughlands fill the eye
and on the hazy limit of the dim

grassy horizon’s rim

the worn-down ramparts of an ancient fort
forgot and weed-grown when the Romans came.
All this was in the cock-crow, and still more,
the mill-leat and the plashy water-meadows

where from the shadows

the cattle move away at milking time
while in the cowshed there’s a clank of pails
and muffled clump of gum-boots in the yard.
How easy is it for me to return

to my own land, and spurn

my bondage in the waste lands of a war.
Which is more real, what I feel and know
and love, though pictured only in my soul,
or the visible world I live in, and ignore?

12 October 1943