From love’s first fever to her plague, from the soft second
And to the hollow minute of the womb,
From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
The time for breast and the green apron age
When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,
All world was one, one windy nothing,
My world was christened in a stream of milk.
And earth and sky were as one airy hill,
The sun and moon shed one white light.

From the first print of the unshodden foot, the lifting
Hand, the breaking of the hair,
From the first secret of the heart, the warning ghost,
And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,
The sun was red, the moon was grey,
The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.

The body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,
The growing bones, the rumour of manseed
Within the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,
And the four winds, that had long blown as one,
Shone in my ears the light of sound,
Called in my eyes the sound of light.
And yellow was the multiplying sand,
Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,
Green was the singing house.

The plum my mother picked matured slowly,
The boy she dropped from darkness at her side
Into the sided lap of light grew strong,
Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh
And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,
Itched in the noise of wind and sun.

And from the first declension of the flesh
I learnt man’s tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
Into the stony idiom of the brain,
To shade and knit anew the patch of words
Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,
Need no word’s warmth.
The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,
That but a name, where maggots have their X.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
The code of night tapped on my tongue;
What had been one was many sounding minded.

One womb, one mind, spewed out the matter,
One breast gave suck the fever’s issue;
From the divorcing sky I learnt the double,
The two-framed globe that spun into a score;
A million minds gave suck to such a bud
As forks my eye;
Youth did condense; the tears of spring
Dissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;
One sun, one manna, warmed and fed.

In a lonely spot that was filled with leaves,
And the wild waste plants without scent or name,
Where never a mourner came,—
That was far from the ground where the false world grieves,
And far from the shade of the church’s eaves—
They buried the Poet with thoughts of shame,
And not as one who believes.

Then the tall grass flower with lolling head,
Who is king of all flowers that twine or creep
On graves where few come to weep,
To the briar, and bindweed, and vetch, he said,
"Lo, here is a grave of the lonely dead;
Let us go up and haste while his soul may sleep,
To make the fresh earth our bed."

Then the rootless briar and bindweed mean,
And the grovelling vetch, with the pale trefoil
That cumbers the fruitless soil,
Yea, the whole strange rout of the earth’s unclean
Went up to the grave that was fresh and green;
And together they wrought there so dense a coil
The grave was no longer seen.

But the tall mad flower whose head is crowned
With the long lax petals that fall and flap
Like the ears of a fool’s bell-cap,
He stood higher than all on the fameless mound;
And nodded his head to each passing sound,
Darting this way and that, as in sport to trap
Each laugh of the winds around.