Vi Connolly's Spring Song

"Returns like a leopard

Slinking by reed-lined pool

Where plates of lilies loll

Where the soft adores the hard."

But to be truthful (so in Clare

My father taught me) to be unlike

Bog Biddy and shiftless Mike,

To be literal, I must declare

I've not seen a leopard, but once

In London, in their fine big Park.

He lay in his sullen dark

Urgeless, to pound or pounce.

He did not arch, nor roar,

Nor visibly reflect my feeling.

He lay, yawning at the ceiling,

Scratching his belly with his paw.

The keeper in blue serge was Anglo-Saxon

Who kept the leopard in his cage.

My feeling is not akin to rage.

That leopard knew no sun

No pool no empty skies.

Only I must in dreams have half forgot it,

Some different leopard, similarly spotted.

Brutal and soft, his catlike sighs,

His stretch, his unbored yawn,

His sudden pounce.

Two years ago

I wrote another song, recall it now,

The same month on another lawn.

In Cairo, from the English language,

Teaching, (in ancestral Erse

Unable to pray or curse)

I victim, not victrix, took my wage

And fell doubly victim,

I catholic to a moslem boy

Ten years my junior. I,

Colonel's daughter, amorous of him,

Corporal only, hardly able

Speaking slowly to exchange

A hundred words of briefest range:

Yet his lips firm, his hands capable,

Orders I dreamed him giving, harsh commands

To others like him in a dusty camp:

My hundred. words a low-powered lamp

To follow as his boots descend

Into the street of 23rd July.

The lawn we sat on was not ours.

Public beside the Nile like the state flowers,

But I do not think that I

Conspicuously blond observed

myself and him more than flowers did

In the hot sun languid

Brilliant and curved.

Side by side we sat, weaving

An interracial unity of two.

Mish Ingliziyah, that he knew.

At sunset he began to sing.

Was it the same song reedy from my bed

In the Italian pension, near

Papery walls, did they hear

Something obscene he may have said?

Expelled from Cairo and returned

With second cousins on a tiny lawn

Waiting for tea near Sittingbourne

I wrote a song and yearned.

Weeping for Abu Muhammad.

Meeting respectable English people

In a village with a steeple

I remembered how he had

Kneecaps of terracotta red.

Why does a leopard come to mind?

He was not cruel to me, but kind.

In shorts he said:

Mademoiselle li wayn timshi?

By Sittingbourne they're white and fresh.

Am I the last dirty leopardess?

Nothing happens after tea.

Nothing all winter, nothing at all.

But now the English boys in caps

(White ratlike noisy little chaps)

Shout at each other, April Fool!

What is happening in my blood?

Why do Jamaicans stare at me?

What do they want, and what would be

The song this time, if I could, and would?