hawkwing_lb | *rustles under the dust covers*

Have I forgotten how this thing works? Are we live ON AIR?

Here we are now.

I'm procrastinating writing a Sleeps With Monsters column (on Kerstin Hall's Star Eater, Nino Cipri's Finna, and Jo Spurrier's Winter Be My Shield) and writing up two history books for Patreon (Jim Bradbury's Stephen and Mathilda: the Civil War of 1139-53, which is alas slight, and Peter Garnsey's Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis, which is basically Food Crises and Their Evidence at Athens and Rome), so while I'm waving my hands around forgetting how focus works, I'll share a poem:

"June Sunset" by Sarojini Naidu

Here shall my heart find its haven of calm,
By rush-fringed rivers and rain-fed streams
That glimmer thro’ meadows of lily and palm.
Here shall my soul find its true repose
Under a sunset sky of dreams
Diaphanous, amber and rose.
The air is aglow with the glint and whirl
Of swift wild wings in their homeward flight,
Sapphire, emerald, topaz, and pearl.
Afloat in the evening light.

A brown quail cries from the tamarisk bushes,
A bulbul calls from the cassia-plume,
And thro’ the wet earth the gentian pushes
Her spikes of silvery bloom.
Where’er the foot of the bright shower passes
Fragrant and fresh delights unfold;
The wild fawns feed on the scented grasses,
Wild bees on the cactus-gold.

An ox-cart stumbles upon the rocks,
And a wistful music pursues the breeze
From a shepherd’s pipe as he gathers his flocks
Under the pipal-trees.
And a young Banjara driving her cattle
Lifts up her voice as she glitters by
In an ancient ballad of love and battle
Set to the beat of a mystic tune,
And the faint stars gleam in the eastern sky
To herald a rising moon.