water.
The people crowd about the well, leaning brown covetous
faces above the coping as my copper falls
slantwise to rest.

Perhaps it will bring me luck, who knows?
It is a very sacred well.
Or perhaps, when it is quite dark, someone who is
hungry....
Then the luck will be his!

The Village of the Mud Idols


The Abandoned God

In the cold darkness of eternity he sits, this god who
has grown old.
His rounded eyes are open on the whir of time, but
man who made him has forgotten him.

Blue is his graven face, and silver-blue his hands. His
eyebrows and his silken beard are scarlet as the
hope that built him.
The yellow dragon on his rotting robes still rears itself
majestically, but thread by thread time eats its
scales away,
And man who made him has forgotten him.

For incense now he breathes the homely smell of rice