Peacocks at Creech

Sunset slants down the Palladian façade,
the clipped yews thicken, grow more black,
the thin-songed midges rise like smoke
as the long, sea-coast, Dorset day
fades from warm gold to dew-chill grey
and each roosting peacock humps its back.

Clumsily to yew-tree's roosting flown,
lawn-strutting done, their small brains dream—
Oh, how alien this English garden
from the sun-parched plain, the grey-green trees
rattling white thorns in the furnace-mouth breeze
by the mosque dome's blue-tiled hard hot gleam.

And those harsh frightened minatory cries
when coming rain stirs their thin cold blood
are for shrieking lightning as storm-clouds drench
the cowering earth in the monsoon's madness:
not the summer shower in its gentle sadness
but the thunder's terror and the frantic flood.

7 December 1946