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The deserted grey shore Cries into the night Enveloping all With a mournful cry Come home come home I'm alone I'm alone The sentry is on guard They are all here, my lives They thread in and out Of my consciousness Enriching the fabric of my present Tantalizing me with feelings and glimpses Never revealing all 'Tis a mosaic of humanity A weaving of dreams and visions Creating a longing to step back into the cast-off shells To know the old cities of my lives The old loves of my lives To release them one by one And let them rise as bubbles From my unconscious To release the tautness - the blandness - of my present one Reaching out to all Even those I should avoid Desperate to find the souls I knew That I was close to That I shared so much with I harbour within me soul upon soul A relentless string of events, unaccounted, unwritten Except perhaps in the history books Egypt - you are lost to me now But how I feel you How I feel I know you How I burned beneath your sun Rested in the cool marshes of the Nile Walked at night by the cold stone pyramids Walked and got jostled in your markets teeming All this I can only suppose Can only guess at The heat of the desert fades in an instant To transform To the green mists of Europe The laneways of Kent Unchanging golden in the summer sun Hallowed and sacred As the little churches that surround. The houses friendly stand With their two story hats Smoke curling lazily up Into the jewelled sky And I know just how many times I have returned to this place A concentration of life upon life What is it that keeps us coming back to this place in particular! I sense the solitary existences I have known! The aloneness! The years of writing down my impressions and thoughts Making my impact on civilization But to have no memory of it Is almost a torture From Kent to the reeking odours of Montmartre The cameradie of poverty I have lived there Is indelible within me. The fiery cheap gut-rotting spirits and wine The foul breath of the women and men I rub shoulders with The desperation of soul Deposited in myriads of small cafes and bars The generations of wine-besotted living The closeness of unkempt bodies - of tattered clothes - Of rough red skin Of raw voice of loud curse Of red eye and fumed breath And then out To the well-ordered freshness of the countryside To green meadows and fields Free-standing stone houses and buildings Gracious mansions With elegant rooms Decorated with finesse With the fastidiousness of the bourgeois and the wealthy The satin gowns down to the ankle The strangling compression of corsetted underwear Of boned bodices Of stiff high collars Of lace handkerchiefs Lavender perfume And pale pale powder Of weak delicate hands Of upswept curling hair The feel of being a lady High-born pampered indolent luxury Bored comfortableness Unutterably vacant intellect Except for domestic details Which ruled my life The silver to be cleaned The wood to be polished The gardens to be trimmed The servants to be organized The day to be endured And across the channel to the pagan times The flowers in the hair The dancing in circles The masks, the play The laughter The boisterous loving sex The clean air on the hillside Dancing among the standing stones Gathering for the great feasts The drinking of mead The conviviality The warmth of feeling The need to be with kin Sheer vivacity of spirit! The absolute compulsion To dance and dance And dance and dance! I ache now for those lives For the depth I feel in them! For the emotion I touch Glimpsing them.