Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, CONFLICT, by SCUDDER MIDDLETON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

CONFLICT, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: How many fires have I started in my blood
Last Line: Stronger than anything in me.


I

How many fires have I started in my blood
With scraps of pride and independence of the day,
That have burned out and left me cold.
And left your face upon the ash!

I can not go by water or through wood,
In peopled towns or any place at all,
But that my insufficient self is lost,
And I turn back defeated to your arms.

II

Though all my veins with yours should mingle,
(This is my desire, secret and denied!)
And those red rivers through you flow,
You would become like one of Eva's children,
I would be nothing then, I know!

III

I am afraid of you:
You are the flesh that has no strength, yet wins
Its way against the heavy-muscled wise,
When the guards sink down beside their spears,
Drunk with magnanimous wines.

IV

You, inscrutable and alien,
Are like a phantom girl within a dream
Where earth and stars are mixed with lips and eyes,
To make an unfamiliar Paradise.

V

I must escape your tenderness and tears,
Or else my world of men becomes a smoky dust.
And all the efforts of this brain and hand
Drift like a haze above the ruined land,
Forever through the undistinguished years.

VI

I am afraid, yet in the end I see
There is the inevitable surrender.
If I would be wholly free .
You are remembering woman, with a purpose
Stronger than anything in me.





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