‘Fear not, O maidens, shivering

As bunches of the dew-drenched leaves

In the calm moonlight… it is the cold sends quivering

My voice, a little nightingale that grieves.

 

Now Time beats not, and dead Love is forgotten…

The spirit too is dead and dank and rotten,

 

And I forget the moment when I ran

Between my lover and the sworded man ―

 

Blinded with terror lest I lose his heart.

The sworded man dropped, and I saw depart

 

Love and my lover and my life… he fled

And I was strung and hung upon the tree.

It is so cold now that my heart is dead

And drops through time… night is too dark to see

 

Him still… But it is spring; upon the fruit-boughs of your lips,

Young maids, the dew like India’s splendor drips.

Pass by among the strawberry beds, and pluck the berries

Cooled by the silver moon; pluck boughs of cherries

 

That seem the lovely lucent coral bough

(From streams of starry milk those branches grow)

That Cassiopeia feeds with her faint light,

Like Ethiopia ever jeweled bright.

 

Those lovely cherries do enclose

Deep in their sweet hearts the silver snows,

 

And the small budding flowers upon the trees

Are filled with sweetness like the bags of bees.

 

Forget my fate… but I, a moonlight ghost,

Creep down the strawberry paths and seek the lost

 

World, the apothecary at the Fair.

I, Deborah, in my long cloak of brown,

Like the small nightingale that dances down

The cherried boughs, creep to the doctor’s bare

Booth… cold as ivy in the air,

 

And, where I stand, the brown and ragged light

Holds something still beyond, hid from my sight.

 

Once, plumaged like the sea, his swanskin head

Had wintry white quills… “Hearken to the Dead

I was a nightingale, but now I croak

Like some dark harpy hidden in night’s cloak

Upon the walls; among the Dead, am quick;

Oh, give me medicine, for the world is sick;

Not medicines, planet―spotted like fritillaries

For country sins and old stupidities,

Nor potions you may give a country maid

When she is lovesick… love in earth is laid,

Grown dead and rotten” … so I sank me down,

Poor Deborah in my long cloak of brown.

Though cockcrow marches, crying of false dawns,

Shall bury my dark voice, yet still it mourns

Among the ruins ― for it is not I,

But this old world, is sick and soon must die!’

– Edith Sitwell

Give me medicine, for the world is sick: dew―drenched new leaves shuddering in the moonlight, a shiver of white musk, and a drop of Italian bergamot.