What's O'Clock/Summer Night Piece
SUMMER NIGHT PIECE
The garden is steeped in moonlight, Full to its high edges with brimming silver, And the fish-ponds brim and darken And run in little serpent lights soon extinguished. Lily-pads lie upon the surface, beautiful as the tarnishings on frail old silver, And the Harvest moon droops heavily out of the sky, A ripe, white melon, intensely, magnificently, shining. Your window is orange in the moonlight, It glows like a lamp behind the branches of the old wistaria, It burns like a lamp before a shrine, The small, intimate, familiar shrine Placed reverently among the bricks Of a much-loved garden wall.