A Letter
by Dom Moraes
Almost I can recall where I was born:
The hot verandas where the chauffeurs drowse,
Backyard dominion of the raged thorn,
And nameless servants in my father’s house,
Whispering together in the backyard dirt
Until their talk came true for me one day:
My father hugging me so hard it hurt,
My mother mad, and time we went away.
We travelled, and I looked for love too
young,
More travel, and I looked for lust
instead.
I was not ruled by wanting: I was
young,
And poems grew like maggots in my head.
A fighting South-East Asia, with each gun
Talking to me; then homeward to the
green
And dung-smeared plains ruled over by the
sun.
When I had done with that, I was
fifteen.
At sixteen I came here to start again.
An infant's trip, where many knew to walk,
I stumbled dumbly through the English
rain,
The literature, the drink, the talk, talk,
talk.
I wrote about them: it was waste of
breath.
For many they were home, for me too
wild,
Too walled for me those valleys full of
death
Who had grown up as wanderer and child.
Of one dying poet I was not afraid
In conversation like an avalanche,
Convincing mainly by the noise he made.
He reinforced his views with
gin-and-French,
Wrinkled and heaving, tuskless
elephant,
He levelled a thick finger, grained with
ink
‘To love somebody, that is what you
want.’
‘Yes’, I would say, accepting one more
drink.
Three winters I was drunk: one early
spring
Brought me first love for you, my great good
news:
Then my excuse to play the drunken king,
Staggering through bars, became a bad
excuse.
The naked valleys shaken with alarms
Where hawk and serpent watched, were touched,
and slept.
Morning and night your image in my arms
Taught me a harder task than to accept.
Earlier in time I prayed to be forgiven.
Through tide-scurf to the acreage of the
whale,
Truest to loneliness my sail was
driven.
The westward haven of the traveller's tale
I have forgotten, making landfall where
Chin in your hand, you sit, and gentle
things
Drift on your dream, transparent river
where
The swan sleeps with her young under her wings.
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