The Woman Speaks:
No food suffices but the food of death;
Sweet is the waxen blood, honey the falling flesh;
There is no fountain springing from the earth
Cool as the wax-red fountains of the veins;
No cradle’s warmer than this perished breast,
And hid behind the fortress of the ribs
The heart lies ready for the raven’s mouth,
And lustreless within the ruined face
The eyes remark the antics of the hawk.
The sniper laid him low and strewed his brains;
One would not think the greenness of this valley
Could in a day be sick with so much blood;
What were young limbs are faggots on the land,
And young guts dry beneath the sickened sun.
Let me not think, O God of carnage,
Of ravens at the hero’s meat and nerves
Pecking and nestling all the time of night.
The grass he covers is a pretty green;
He has the still moon and the hundred stars;
He learns the carrion pickers of the sky,
And on his shoulders fall their world of wings,
And on his ears hosannas of the grave.
His narrow house is walled with blades of grass,
Roofed with the sky and patterned with blond bones;
The birds make him his cerements of plumes,
Cerecloth of weed, and build an ordured bed.
Since the first flesh of man was riven
By scalpel lightning from the rifted sky,
Man’s marrow barbed, and breast ripped with a steel,
All that was loved and loved made the fowls’ food,
Grief, like an open wound, has cried to heaven.
No food suffices but the food of death;
Death’s appetite is sharpened by the bullet’s thumb;
Yet he is dead, and still by woman’s womb
Hungers for quickening, and my lonely lips
Hunger for him who dungs the valley fields.
There shall be no mute mourning over his acre,
Sorrow shall have no words, no willow wearing;
Rain shall defile and cover, wind bear away
The saddest dust in all this hollow world.
Old men whose blood is hindered in their veins,
Whom cancer crops, whose drinking rusts, these die;
These die who shovel the last home of man;
The sniper dies; the fingers from the sky
Strangle the little children in their beds;
One day my woman’s body will be cold.
So I have come to know, but knowledge aches;
I know that age is snow upon the hair,
Wind carven lines around the drooping mouth;
And raven youth will feast but where he will.
Since the first womb spat forth a baby’s corpse,
The mother’s cry has fumed about the winds;
O tidal winds, cast up her cry for me;
That I may drown, let loose her flood of tears.
It was a haggard night the first flesh died,
And shafted hawks came snarling down the sky;
A mouse it was played with an ivory tooth,
And ravens fed confection to their young.
Palm of the earth, O sprinkle on my head
That dust you hold, O strew that little left;
Let what remains of that first miracle
Be sour in my hair. That I may learn
The mortal miracle, let that first dust
Tell me of him who feeds the raging birds.