Windy Night Haoyar Rat

Last night was thick with wind, a time of countless stars.

All night long, a vast wind played within my mosquito net.

At times that net swelled like a monsoon sea's belly.

Tearing loose from the bed every once in a

It would try to fly to the stars.

Now and then it seemed to me-perhaps while half asleep-that therewas no mosquito net over my head at all,

As it soared like a white heron upon a sea of blue wind, skirting thehip of the star Swati!

Last night was such a marvelous night.

All the dead stars awoke last night-there wasn't the least little spacein the sky.

I saw the gray faces of all the world's beloved dead in those stars.

In the dark of night, in aswattha treetops, those stars glittered like alusty hawk's dewy eyes.

The huge sky gleamed in the moonlit night like a shining cheetah stoleupon the shoulders of Babylon's queen.

Last night was such an amazing night.

Those stars in the bosom of the sky that died thousands of years ago,

They, too, brought with them through the window last night countless,  dead skies.

Those stunning women I saw die in Assyria,

Egypt,

Vidisa,

Seemed last night to stand shoulder to shoulder, javelin in hand, in far-  off mist and fog at the sky's horizon:

To trample death under foot?

To proclaim full victory for life?

To excite the sullen, frightful stupor of love?

I was overwhelmed-overcome,

As though torn by last night's compelling blue the sky's endless, expansive

The earth, like some insect, was swept away last night.>From the sky's bosom came the lofty

Sighing through my window,

Like so very many zebras of a verdant land, startled by the lion's roar.

My heart filled with the scent of a vast green grassy veldt,

With horizon-flooding blazing sunlight scent,

With the restless, massive, vibrant, woolly outburst of darkness,

Like growls of an aroused tigress,

With life's untamable blue intoxication!

My heart tore free from the earth and flew,

Flew up like a drunken balloon into an ocean of blue wind,

To the mast of some distant constellation, scattering stars as it flappedaway like some mischievous vulture.