This Landscape, These People

1

My eighth spring in England I walk among
The silver birches of Putney Heath,
Stepping over twigs and stones: being stranger,
I see but do not touch: only the earth
Permits an attachment. I do not wish
To be seen, and move, eyes at my sides, like a fish.

And do they notice me, I wonder, these
Englishmen strolling with stiff country strides?
I lean against a tree, my eyes are knots
In its bark, my skin the wrinkles in its sides.
I leap hedges, duck under chestnut boughs,
And through the black clay let my swift heels trail like ploughs.

A child at a museum, England for me
Is an exhibit within a glass case.
The country, like an antique chair, has a rope
Across it. I may not sit, only pace
Its frontiers. I slip through ponds, jump ditches,
Through galleries of ferns see England in pictures.

2

My seventeen years in India I swam
Along the silver beaches of Bombay,
Pulled coconuts from the sky, and tramped
Red horizons with the swagger and sway
Of Romantic youth; with the impudence
Of a native tongue, I cried for independence.

troupe came to town, marched through the villages;
Began with two tight-rope walkers, eyes gay
And bamboos and rope on their bare shoulders;
A snake charmer joined them, beard long and gray,
Baskets of cobras on his turbaned head;
Through villages marched: children, beating on drums, led

Them from village to village, and jugglers
Joined them and swallowers of swords, eaters
Of fire brandishing flames through the thick air,
Jesters with tongues obscene as crows’, creatures
Of the earth: stray dogs, lean jackals, a cow;
Stamping, shouting, entertaining, making a row

From village to village they marched to town:
Conjurors to bake bread out of earth, poets
To recite epics at night. The troupe, grown
Into a nation, halted, squirmed: the sets
For its act, though improvised, were re-cast
From the frames of an antique, slow-moving, dead past.

India halted: as suddenly as a dog,
Barking, hangs out his tongue, stifles his cry.
An epic turned into a monologue
Of death. The rope lay stiff across the country;
All fires were eaten, swallowed all the swords;
The horizons paled, then thickened, blackened with crows.

Born to this continent, all was mine
To pluck and taste: pomegranates to purple
My tongue and chillies to burn my mouth. Stones
Were there to kick. This landscape, these people—
Bound by the rope and consumed by their fire.

3

This landscape, these people! Silver birches
With polished trunks chalked around a chestnut.
All is fall-of-night still. No thrush reaches
Into the earth for worms, nor pulls at the root
Of a crocus. Dogs have led their masters home.
I stroll, head bowed, hearing only the sound of loam

At my heel’s touch. Now I am intimate
With England; we meet, secret as lovers.
I pluck leaves and speak into the air’s mouth;
As a woman’s hair, I deck with flowers
The willow’s branches; I sit by the pond,
My eyes are stars in its stillness; as with a wand,

I stir the water with a finger until
It tosses waves, until countries appear
From its dark bed: the road from Putney Hill
Runs across oceans into the harbour
Of Bombay. To this country I have come.
Stranger or an inhabitant, this is my home.
Born here, among these people, I was stranger.