A Girl's Music

Among the piano's fire-lit keys

Intoxicate her fingers creep.

Ah cease! they make one near to weep,

These unskilled poignant melodies.

What vicious-hearted djinn has sent

Such tortured beauty to this child,

Making her drunken with these wild

Sad dronings of the Orient?

Some half-thing sure she must recall

Of furious splendour, gorgeous lust,

Claiming her through the wind and dust

Of crumbling ages’ lapse and fall.

The spell still sways her inwardly,

The dream burns in her languid eyes,

While almost angrily she tries

To re-invoke her tragedy

And the gorged drowsy fiend who gloats

On her half-naked loveliness

That in the dance nigh fainting floats

Through the hot scents, whilst all the place

Vibrates with rhythmic hammerings,

With thunderous noise of pear-shaped drums,

And some hunched rocking goblin thrums

Outlandishly on golden strings.

I think they bade her dance and die

In one night's fume and din and shame,

For in this music throbs the same

Fierce weariness and ecstasy.

DERMOT O’BYRNE (a.k.a. Arnold Bax)