I am deciphered by the black waters,
union, and terrorist surge avid in my fields,
sun my god, the purpose love,
and the strong swing of hawks my blazing shield.
Here I was an age unfolding
like the rose my veneer panels to the rafters,
and the natural birds blinked,
and at my birth the yellow waters followed after.
I lay, like tyranny, in my own corn,
waiting nightfall as the mice
to play the moribund penury of desire
at the sneering globule of the moon.
Many times it descended, and my eyes,
the lids overburdened with shame,
and my darkness joining the burning
auguries of death, the salamanders in my breast.
At last I reached that sullen age
where my chains crackled and spat
like the burning of cellophane, bursting,
leaving me to descend with the
ghastly inevitability of virtue
on the sleeping cancer, the lambent world of men.
My shadow cast madness, and fangs
honored me from the jaws of dogs.
Childen [sic] no longer wept, but laughed
their tiny sadistic joys up and down
the paralysing fingers of the town.
The old, decreeing death was dead,
raised great marbles, like teeth, to me.
But seeking one heart, depair [sic]
settled down like patient murder
upon the mobile world of my feet.
Leaving men for manna, dreams for blood.
imagination leapt aortal channels
and rested sibilant in the lake of gall:
the doctors operating on the landscape
removed the belly of the mountain
and gaunt entrails rolled like smoke-signs,
clouds, bellying from the hills,
on the laval sweetness of the slopes.
The trees that had lived to whip the birds
rocked and moaned, pitiful as mothers,
and breasts were tortured with the weight of milk.
This eye, the black eternal waters,
the wild incestuous caverns, my kiss,
lay trembling before this neutral agency;
and final was that whisper of the world
which said, ‘0 agony, to be love’.
(Max Harris)
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Based on Topics: Love Poems, Man Poems, God Poems, World Poems, Sadness Poems, Death & Dying Poems, Nature Poems, Dreams Poems, Sleep Poems, Birds Poems, Mothers PoemsBased on Keywords: crackled, bellying, auguries, veneer, sibilant, cellophane, salamanders, operating, agency, overburdened, globule