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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

Color

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

A BLUE-BLACK Nubian plucking oranges

At Jaffa by a sea of malachite,

In red tarboosh, green sash, and flowing white

Burnous—among shadowy memories

That haunt me yet by these bleak northern seas

He lives forever in my eyes’ delight;

Bizarre, superb in young immortal might,

A god of old barbaric mysteries.

Maybe he lived a life of lies and lust,

Maybe his bones are now but scattered dust;

Yet for a moment he was life supreme

Exultant and unchallenged; and my rhyme

Would set him safely out of reach of time

In that old heaven where things are what they seem.