An Indian Miniature

Abul Hasan Shah, Sultan of Golconda, you

Are still walking, this fine morning, through

A late 17th-century field of flowers, dressed

In your tent-like, flowered dressing gown,

Your beard close-cropped already at dawn

By the servant who carries your blue sunshade

Umbrella. You are fat and happy. I remark

You here, in this museum, among a thousand

Others because we look alike-are dead

Ringers for each other. You have plucked

A flower at your feet and smell the sweetness-

I always do that too when I walk through flowers;

And, this morning, Chick The Barber cut back

'My black beard, covering my great girth

With the pitched tent of his flowered barber's cloth.

Milord, as I take this respite from my rounds

Of work as sometime teacher and old-time academic pol,

Iam happy to have found you: we are both

Potentates of minor and provincial states.