Nostalgia for India by May Sarton

In the clean, anodyne
Hotel room in Athens,
I am suddenly homesick for
The Indian night
And my dark cell
In Orissa
Where I was visited
By a white lizard
With emerald eyes,
By an articulate frog,
And sometimes, very late,
By a wandering shrew.
The lizard chittered
And danced;
The shrew ran compulsively
Along the wall;
The frog,
When I lifted him up,
Gave a single heart-rending cry.
In my unmysterious
White room,
I miss the chittering,
The cry of despair,
The silent, lunatic trot —
It is too sane here for words.