The Immortal Song

If poets be the "priests of mankind",

And their verse "a perpetual priesthood from age to age

" Their sermons should be to men what thought is to mind:

Invisibly light, and moving with might

Like a message of love from a loving sage.

If that be so, then let them sing

Their songs of man to man,

And breathe their magic, as before the Heavenly King.

Upon their fellow beings wherever they can.

FORT DERAWAR

To look a fortress of clay in the desert (idealised)

Is to look at a piece of millennia fossilised

On the brownish sands of which it seems a part;

It is content to continue as monument of a sort.

In constant comparison to ever changing sands it stays,

As it has stayed during countless nights and days,

Decaying, though in the forgetfulness of its distant past,

It's caught between sleep and wakefulness and lost

In its earthly dreams of rivers and clouds and rains.

It's no less than a miracle that it still remains,

Retaining, in diminishing parts, its grey, deserting glory,

With no one except its own decadence to tell the story

Of the flourishing royal costumes and princely feasts,

Of monarchical manners, regal crowns and elegant seats

That were once the living scenario of its chambers!

The not-extant ornamentations of diamonds with ambers!

Like a dimly painted citadel against the infinite azure

And the backdrop of its natural habitat and its lore,

It still takes its strength from the soil and its weeds,

Surviving like some still-unforgotten creeds.

In the face of the heat-oppressed days with the burning sun,

Resisting the usual dust storms one may certainly shun.

Like a terracotta mould or a worn out bust,

With ill-concealed wrinkles and fast withering crust,

As a dozing god, still capable of angry looks,

It is there, though with no rivulets or oozing brooks,

Alloying itself, while retaining a kind of grandeur,

More in imaginations than in the bastions that endure,

Overlooking the waterless tracts and countless dunes,

With its deserted halls re-echoing the tunes

Of the songs sung with lyrical cries in vain

By the camel drivers, sadly driving their trains

Of camels, crossing the arid, vast lands, and dried up rivers of yore--

(Living only in the legends and still remembered folklore),

Rivers, that have gone somewhere in search of a drop or two

And may return roaring and rushing if ever they rue!