What became of Ballard’s guns? Afghans
black and grubby
Sell them for their silver weight to the men of Pubbi;
And the shiny bowie-knife and the town-made sword
are
Hanging in a Marri camp just across the Border.
What became of Mookerjee? Ask Mahommed Yar
Prodding Siva’s sacred bull down the Bow Bazaar.
Speak to placid Nubbee Baksh—question land
and sea—
Ask the Indian Congressmen—only don’t
ask me!
“They are fools who kiss and tell”—
Wisely has the poet sung.
Man may hold all sorts of posts
If he’ll only hold his tongue.
Jenny and Me were engaged, you see,
On the eve of the Fancy Ball;
So a kiss or two was nothing to you
Or any one else at all.
Jenny would go in a domino—
Pretty and pink but warm;
While I attended, clad in a splendid
Austrian uniform.
Now we had arranged, through notes exchanged
Early that afternoon,
At Number Four to waltz no more,
But to sit in the dusk and spoon.
I wish you to see that Jenny and Me
Had barely exchanged our troth;
So a kiss or two was strictly due
By, from, and between us both.
When Three was over, an eager lover,
I fled to the gloom outside;
And a Domino came out also
Whom I took for my future bride.
That is to say, in a casual way,
I slipped my arm around her;
With a kiss or two (which is nothing to you),
And ready to kiss I found her.
She turned her head and the name she said
Was certainly not my own;
But ere I could speak, with a smothered shriek
She fled and left me alone.
Then Jenny came, and I saw with shame
She’d doffed her domino;
And I had embraced an alien waist—
But I did not tell her so.
Next morn I knew that there were two
Dominoes pink, and one
Had cloaked the spouse of Sir Julian House,
Our big Political gun.
Sir J. was old, and her hair was gold,
And her eye was a blue cerulean;
And the name she said when she turned her head
Was not in the least like “Julian.”
Shun—shun the Bowl! That fatal, facile
drink
Has ruined many geese who dipped their
quills in ’t;
Bribe, murder, marry, but steer clear of Ink
Save when you write receipts for paid-up
bills in ’t.
There may be silver in the “blue-black”—all
I know of is the iron and the gall.
Boanerges Blitzen, servant of the Queen,
Is a dismal failure—is a Might-have-been.
In a luckless moment he discovered men
Rise to high position through a ready pen.
Boanerges Blitzen argued therefore—“I,
With the selfsame weapon, can attain as high.”
Only he did not possess when he made the trial,
Wicked wit of C-lv-n, irony of L—l.
