Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, DUST, by KATHLEEN JESSIE RAINE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

DUST, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Only my dust is never laid
Last Line: And then unmakes again the world the dance has made.
Subject(s): Crosses; Death; Dust; Dead, The


Only my dust is never laid
And only I must always die.
This dust has travelled with the earth since suns were made
Yet never left eternity

Whose rule is traced upon my hand that writes,
That bears the seal of nature's forms and states;
The stars obey that order, and the grass,
The beautiful, the innocent, and the saints.

These bones have known the molten rocks outpoured
In transmutation of the solar fires,
Obedient to the laws that I have broken,
The power and glory of the reigning sun.

My blood streams with the motion of the tides,
The fall of rain and cataract, storm and calm,
Has undergone the freezing of the ice
And the baroque assumption of the clouds.

The shape of the cross is laid upon the void
By the first flash that leaps between the poles.
The world is built upon a separation
Whose distance the long light-years cannot close.
The wound proliferates, the rift extends.

Man's passion is predestined in the tree,
The cross-beams of the heavens, vegetation,
The thorns, the iron, and the organic thirst
From the beginning raise his calvary.

The dust sweeps through the figures of a dance,
Moves in its ritual transit like a bride
Imprinting shells and flowers with spiral forms that pass
To fossil wastes and whirling nebulae,
Weaving the rose, the lamb, and the world's darling child,
And then unmakes again the world the dance has made.





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