Place of Strangers

My country is a land of morning mists and cloud;
Jade, indigo, silver, show true their colors there,
When Ur was young, twas then already ancient.
Noon's late light shimmers tints in aqua greens;
Its bay, butter yellow beneath cottons of blue-
Blurred grey, darks under the summer's storm.


When my name is numbered in the ledger of death
And my tomb added amongst the gardens of stone,
Let me not lie alone in a gaunt grave place of aliens.
Bleak, sinister and bitter is the common end of man;
So to be sequestered, squeezed between strangers,
Buried outside my nation is to be more abandoned still.