WHEN he pushed his bush of black
hair off his brow:
When she lifted her mop from her eyes, and screwed it in
a
knob behind
— O act of
fearful temerity!
When they felt their foreheads bare, naked to heaven,
their
eyes revealed:
When they felt the light of
heaven brandished like a knife
at their defenceless
eyes,
And the sea
like a blade at their face,
Mediterranean savages:
When they came out,
face-revealed, under heaven, from the
shaggy undergrowth of
their own hair
For
the first time,
They
saw tiny rose cyclamens between their toes,
growing
Where the
slow toads sat brooding on the past.
Slow toads, and cyclamen
leaves
Stickily
glistening with eternal shadow
Keeping to earth.
Cyclamen leaves
Toad-filmy, earth-iridescent
Beautiful
Frost-filigreed
Spumed with mud
Snail-nacreous
Low
down.
The shaking aspect of the
sea
And man’s
defenceless bare face
And cyclamens putting their ears
back.
Long, pensive, slim-muzzled
greyhound buds
Dreamy, not yet present,
Drawn out of earth
At his toes.
Dawn-rose
Sub-delighted,
stone-engendered
Cyclamens, young cyclamens
Arching
Waking, pricking their ears
Like delicate very-young
greyhound bitches
Half-yawning at the open, inexperienced
Vista of day,
Folding back their soundless
petalled ears.
Greyhound bitches
Sending their rosy muzzled
pensive down,
And
breathing soft, unwilling to wake to the new day
Yet
sub-delighted.
Ah Mediterranean morning, when our
world began!
Far-off
Mediterranean mornings,
Pelasgic faces uncovered,
And unbudding
cyclamens.
The hare suddenly goes
uphill
Laying back
her long ears with unwinking bliss.
And up the pallid, sea-blenched
Mediterranean stone-slopes
Rose cyclamen, ecstatic fore-runner!
Cyclamens, ruddy-muzzled
cyclamens
In little
bunches like bunches of wild hares
Muzzles together, ears-aprick
Whispering
witchcraft
Like
women at a well, the dawn-fountain.
Greece, and the world’s
morning
Where all
the Parthenon marbles still fostered the roots of
the
cyclamen.
Violets
Pagan,
rosy-muzzled violets
Autumnal
Dawn-pink,
Dawn-pale
Among
squat toad-leaves sprinkling the unborn
Erechtheion
marbles.
Taormina.