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Aquarium

Chapter 10: Confetti
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About This Book

A sequence of vivid lyric poems juxtaposes urban modernity and sensual escapism, shifting between images of aquaria, industrial streets, cathedrals, cabarets and cultivated gardens. Rich sensory detail and decadent diction evoke crowded factories, neon-lit cafés, and intimate interiors while poems alternate social satire, melancholic reverie and pastoral relief. Several pieces use theatrical vignettes and musical rhythms to render characters and scenes indirectly, while others address sacred space, memory and longing through ornate imagery. The book’s structure groups shorter, imagistic poems into two parts that balance urban manners with curving, often erotic or elegiac, meditations.

Confetti

LET us sprinkle in the air
Colours, colours everywhere.
Peacock’s eyes in April showers
Plucked in silver-sandalled hours,
Wings of fireflies iridescent,
Jets of drift-wood incandescent.
Let us hurl them to the skies
Ere the pallid dawn arise.
Minion jewel-plumaged birds,
Specks and flecks in dappled herds,
Tangle in your moonlit hair
Whilst you’re smiling unaware.
In the paper fluttering
Pipe-like voices seem to sing,
Little flutes of heron bone,
Tremulously soft in tone
As by eerie wizards played,
Make one wonder, half afraid.
Empty trickle of the breeze
Through the perfumed orangeries
Like a tiptoe of a faun,
Come a-heralding the dawn.
Let us sprinkle in the air
Colours, colours everywhere.