Color

Who will not tell.

This is my hour

To wax and climb,

Flaunt a red flower

In the face of time.

And only an hour

Time gives, then snap

Goes the flower,

And dried is the sap.

Juice of the first

Grapes of my vine,

I proffer your thirst

My own heart’s wine.

Here of my growing

A red rose sways,

Seed of my sowing,

And work of my days.

(I run, but time’s

Abreast with me;

I sing, but he climbs

With my highest C.)

Drink while my blood

Colors the wine,

Reach while the bud

Is still on the vine....

Then ...

When the hawks of death

Tear at my throat

Till song and breath

Ebb note by note,

Turn to this book

Of the mellow word

For a singing look

At the stricken bird.

Say, “This is the way

He chirped and sung,

In the sweet heyday

When his heart was young.

Though his throat is bare,

By death defiled,

Song labored there

And bore a child.”

When the dreadful Ax

Rives me apart,

When the sharp wedge cracks

My arid heart,

Turn to this book

Of the singing me

For a springtime look

At the wintry tree.

Say, “Thus it was weighed

With flower and fruit,

Ere the Ax was laid

Unto its root.

Though the blows fall free

On a gnarled trunk now,

Once he was a tree

With a blossomy bough.”

Across the earth’s warm, palpitating crust

I flung my body in embrace; I thrust

My mouth into the grass and sucked the dew,

Then gave it back in tears my anguish drew;

So hard I pressed against the ground, I felt

The smallest sandgrain like a knife, and smelt

The next year’s flowering; all this to speed

My body’s dissolution, fain to feed

The worms. And so I groaned, and spent my strength

Until, all passion spent, I lay full length

And quivered like a flayed and bleeding thing.

So lay till lifted on a great black wing

That had no mate nor flesh-apparent trunk

To hamper it; with me all time had sunk

Into oblivion; when I awoke

The wing hung poised above two cliffs that broke

The bowels of the earth in twain, and cleft

The seas apart. Below, above, to left,

To right, I saw what no man saw before:

Earth, hell, and heaven; sinew, vein, and core.

All things that swim or walk or creep or fly,

All things that live and hunger, faint and die,

Were made majestic then and magnified

By sight so clearly purged and deified.

The smallest bug that crawls was taller than

A tree, the mustard seed loomed like a man.

The earth that writhes eternally with pain

Of birth, and woe of taking back her slain,

Laid bare her teeming bosom to my sight,

And all was struggle, gasping breath, and fight.

A blind worm here dug tunnels to the light,

And there a seed, racked with heroic pain,

Channels of the chafing net

Where they surge and foam and fret.

Africa? A book one thumbs

Listlessly, till slumber comes.

Unremembered are her bats

Circling through the night, her cats

Crouching in the river reeds,

Stalking gentle flesh that feeds

By the river brink; no more

Does the bugle-throated roar

Cry that monarch claws have leapt

From the scabbards where they slept.

Silver snakes that once a year

Doff the lovely coats you wear,

Seek no covert in your fear

Lest a mortal eye should see;

What’s your nakedness to me?

Here no leprous flowers rear

Fierce corollas in the air;

Here no bodies sleek and wet,

Dripping mingled rain and sweat,

Tread the savage measures of

Jungle boys and girls in love.

What is last year’s snow to me,

Last year’s anything? The tree

Budding yearly must forget

How its past arose or set—

Bough and blossom, flower, fruit,

Even what shy bird with mute

Wonder at her travail there,

Meekly labored in its hair.

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his fathers loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me?

So I lie, who find no peace

I THINK when Judas’ mother heard

His first faint cry the night

That he was born, that worship stirred

Her at the sound and sight.

She thought his was as fair a frame

As flesh and blood had worn;

I think she made this lovely name

For him—“Star of my morn.”

As any mother’s son he grew

From spring to crimson spring;

I think his eyes were black, or blue,

His hair curled like a ring.

His mother’s heart-strings were a lute

Whereon he all day played;

She listened rapt, abandoned, mute,

To every note he made.

I think he knew the growing Christ,

And played with Mary’s son,

And where mere mortal craft sufficed,

There Judas may have won.

Perhaps he little cared or knew,

So folly-wise is youth,

That He whose hand his hand clung to

Was flesh-embodied Truth;

Until one day he heard young Christ,

With far-off eyes agleam,

Tell of a mystic, solemn tryst

Between Him and a dream.

And Judas listened, wonder-eyed,

Until the Christ was through,

Then said, “And I, though good betide,

Or ill, will go with you.”

And so he followed, heard Christ preach,

Saw how by miracle

The blind man saw, the dumb got speech,