CAMPBELL, Roy

The Zulu Girl

When in the sun the hot red acres smoulder

Down where the sweating gang its labour plies

A girl flings down her hoe, and from her shoulder

Unslings her child tormented by flies.

She takes him to a ring of shadow pooled

By the thorn-tree: purpled with the blood of ticks,

While her sharp nails, in slow caresses ruled

Prowl through his hair with sharp electric clicks.

His sleepy mouth, plugged by the heavy nipple,

Tugs like a puppy, grunting as he feels;

Through his frail nerves her own deep languor’s ripple

Like a broad river sighing through the reeds.

Yet in that drowsy stream his flesh imbibes

And old unquenched, unsmotherable heat-

The curbed ferocity of beaten tribes,

The sullen dignity of their defeat.

Her body looms above him like a hill

Within whose shade a village lies at rest,

Or the first cloud so terrible and still

That bears the coming harvest in its breast.

Horses On The Camargue

In the grey wastes of dread,

The haunt of shattered gulls where nothing moves

But in a shroud of silence like the dead,

I heard a sudden harmony of hooves,

And, turning, saw afar

A hundred snowy horses unconfined,

The silver runaways of Neptune's car

Racing, spray-curled, like waves before the wind.

Sons of the Mistral, fleet

As him with whose strong gusts they love to flee,

Who shod the flying thunders on their feet

And plumed them with the snortings of the sea;

Theirs is no earthly breed

Who only haunts the verges of the earth

And only on the sea's salt herbage feed-

Surely the great white breakers gave them birth.

For when for years a slave,

A horse of the Camargue, in alien lands,

Should catch some far-off fragrance of the wave

Carried far inland from this native sands,

Many have told the tale

Of how in fury, foaming at the rein,

He hurls his rider; and with lifted tail,

With coal-red eyes and catarcating mane,

Heading his course for home,

Though sixty foreign leagues before him sweep,

Will never rest until he breathes the foam

And hears the native thunder of the deep.

And when the great gusts rise

And lash their anger on these arid coasts,

When the scared gulls career with mournful cries

And whirl across the waste like driven ghosts;

When hail and fire converge,

The only souls to which they strike no pain

Are the white crested fillies of the surge

And the white horses of the windy plain.

Then in their strength and pride

The stallions of the wilderness rejoice;

They feel their Master's trident in their side,

And high and shrill they answer to his voice.

With white tails smoking free,

Long streaming manes, and arching necks, they show

Their kinship to their sisters of the sea-

And forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow.

Still out of hardship bred,

Spirits of power and beauty and delight

Have ever on such frugal pasture fed

And loved to course with tempests through the night.