In warm rusty ships they are sent
to places
Void now of the purple prisms of the
East,
Their brown bodies tired with skepticism’s
yeast,
The Levantine babble was kept from
their young faces.
Yet “les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se
répondent,”
Baudelaire’s buried but his images go
deeper;
Perfume, amber, Saint Jean, verdigris, and
chypre,
Their symbolic mission to the warm
Eastern pond.
Sons of the brume, of the restraining roof
on ô!
Long outshouted by Wagner’s Heya-Ho!
Long told that their race has come seedless
and brittle,
And yet: there they were, berets gay with
menace,
To still remind the world, these Français
en Chypre,
Of the still entente between Saint George
and Saint Denis.
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