Jungle Flower

<SPAN name="startofbook"></SPAN> <p id="id00212" style="margin-top: 2em">The Jungle Flower</p> <p id="id00213" style="margin-top: 2em">Ah, the cool silence of the shaded hours,<br/> The scent and colour of the jungle flowers!<br/></p> <p id="id00214">Thou art one of the jungle flowers, strange and fierce and fair,<br/> Palest amber, perfect lines, and scented with champa flower.<br/> Lie back and frame thy face in the gloom of thy loosened hair;<br/> Sweet thou art and loved—ay, loved—for an hour.<br/></p> <p id="id00215">But thought flies far, ah, far, to another breast,<br/> Whose whiteness breaks to the rose of a twin pink flower,<br/> Where wind the azure veins that my lips caressed<br/> When Fate was gentle to me for a too-brief hour.<br/></p> <p id="id00216">There is my spirit's home and my soul's abode,<br/> The rest are only inns on the traveller's road.<br/></p> <div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />