Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

58 England and Baroda, 1883 – 1898
The yellow moon, whom Heaven once more
From silver cowl did shake,
With golden letters scribbled o’er
The purple-written lake.
But when to Heaven’s polished breast
Her rounded amulet clung
Below in the blue palimpsest
A slit, a chasm sprung.
A meteor from the purple brink,
A vivid star no eye may lose,
A pictured bowl of nectarous drink,
An apparition rose.
Her body lapped in cloth of gold
A wave disguised in moonlight seemed,
Whose every curve and curious fold
With opal facets gleamed.
Her nestling mass of rounded curls
Were soft as velvet cloths,
Once fingered by Arabian girls
Or piled in Syrian booths.
She was an ebon-framèd lyre
Where wind-waked murmurs dance,
A tinted statue of Desire
In studios of Romance.
Her glowing cheeks just ripe with youth,
The purple passion of her eyes,
Half seemed a splendid mock at truth,
A brilliant mesh of lies.
Below with balmy sobs that drank
The must of life thro’ thirsty lips,
Her painèd bosom heaved and sank
Like Ocean-cradled ships.
And as bee-blossoms sapphire-looped,
The humming waves that kiss,
Her creamy forehead almost drooped
Burthened with too much bliss.