Bitter Lemons

by Lawrence Durrell

BITTER LEMONS

In an island of bitter lemons

Where the moon's cool fevers burn

From the dark globes of the fruit,

And the dry grass underfoot

Tortures memory and revises

Habits half a lifetime dead

Better leave the rest unsaid,

beauty, darkness, vehemence

Let the old sea nurses keep

Their memorials of sleep

And the Greek sea's curly head

Keep its calms like tears unshed

Keep its calms like tears unshed.

AT RHODES

Anonymous hand, record one afternoon,

In May, some time before the fig-leaf:

Boats lying idle in the sky, a town

Thrown as on a screen of watered silk,

Lying on its side, reddish and soluble,

A sheet of glass leading down into the sea . . .

Down here an idle boy catches a cicada:

Imprisons it, laughing, in his sister's cloa

In whose warm folds the silly creature sings.

Shape of boats, body of a young girl, cicada,

Conspire and join each other here,

In twelve sad lines against the dark.

SHIPS. ISLANDS. TREES

These ships, these islands, these simple trees

Are our rewrds in substance, being poor.

This earth a dictionary is

To the root and growth of seeing,

And to the servant heart a door.

Some on the green surface of the land

With all their canvas up in leav and flower,

And some empty of influence

But from the water-winds,

Free as love's green attractions are.

Smoke bitter and blue from farms.

And points of feeble light in houses

Come after them in the scale

Of the material and the beautiful;

Are not less complex but less delicate

And less important than these living

Instruments of space,

Whose quiet communication is

With older trees in ships on the grey waves:

And order and a music

Like a writing on the skies

Too private for the reason or the pen;

Too simple even for the heart's surprise.

From The Poetry of Lawrence Durrell, 1962.