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Remember That Country

My dear, do you remember that country
Of abandoned stone houses with their roofs toppled in,
Eyes of their windows blank sockets,
Great nest-holes for birds and ways for the wind?
Steps to them crumbling, the grasses grown wild,
Half hay and half weed in the gardens?
And the ascensions and erosions of mountains
Sharply arising from the river's deep basin
Where the hilltowns saat in their jagged nests,
Abandoned as well, and dying.
Ancient, so ancient, built
In the times of the Saracens
When the only defense was retreat
And triple-made bastions of walls out of rock,
So old, who had been driven so far
Up to such verges, to live at all.
Do you remember, and the deep gorges,
Those long gashes in earth the river had cut,
Very fantasias of concentric circles of rock
Up which the stream's bed went?
And the joy of the day, the way the birds sang,
The sun on the river, the rosemary and lavender,
Do you remember the fête and the danceband
To which the nightingales sang?
And the women washing clothes
In the brimmed stone tubs on the turns of the way
Up to the first of those towns so crookedly set
On crazy needles of rock?
And the goat bleating in a shut-in stable?
Do you remember? It was you set the pace,
You would take every zigzag path,

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