both sides of the window

a leafy trellis with roses carl spitzweg

naked apples, wooly-coated peaches

swelled on the garden's wall. unbounded

odour of windless, spice-bearing trees

surrounded my lying in sacred turf,

made dense the guarded air - the forest of trees

buoyed up therein like weeds in ocean

lived without motion. i was the pearl,

mother-of-pearl my bower. milk-white the cirrhus

streaked the blue egg-shell of the distant sky,

early and distant, over the spicy forest;

wise was the fangless serpent, drowsy.

all this, indeed, I do not remember.

i remember the remembering, when first waking

i heard the golden gates behind me

fall to, shut fast. on the flinty road,

black-frosty, blown on with an eastern wind,

i found my feet. forth on journey,

gathering thin garment over aching bones,

i went. i wander still. but the world is round.

c.s. lewis, poems