Confessions of an English Opium Smoker
In some sobriety offer to recall those images: Damsel, dome, and dulcimer, Portentous pageants, alien altars, Foul unimaginable imagined monster, Façades of fanfares, Lord's Prayer Tattooed backwards on a Manchu fingernail, Enigma, or a dread too well aware, Swirling curtains, almond eyes or smell?
And I regain these images: Rocked by the modern traffic of the town, A grubby, badly lighted, stuffy shack— A hollow in some nobody's family tree, The undistinguished womb of anybody's Average mother. And then me, In all sobriety, slight pain in neck and back, Expecting that and then a little more, Right down to bed-rock.
This was no coloured twopenny,
Just a common people's penny sheet—
To read with cool avidity.
(What would you do with dulcimers, And damsels, and such embarrassments?
Imagined beasts more foul than real monsters?
No man at peace writes poetry.) Thus I recall, despite myself, the images
That merely were. I offer my sedate respects
To those so sober entertainments,
Suited to our day and ages. D. J. ENRIGHT
Previous page
