Poets Corner

The donkey waiting under a load of jars
Under the prickly-pear and the white walls
Of this necropolis brays without an echo
To stir the rare blue waterfalls of shade.
There is nothing here, nothing at all.
Only, perhaps a question or a mood
A reference or a suggestion,
Rocks and the sun, and pastures for dolphins
Scattered with other islands, old and bare
As jutting bones, recent as thunderbolts.

Unfathomable wells
Tunnel the heart of the pumice. Like a hand
The fig leaf lays a shadow on the dust.

These islands are at the end of a hundred worlds.

From Greek Archipelagoes, Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1949