If you love me drink this discolored wine, tanning at the edge with the sourness of flowers - their heads, soldiers', floating as flowers, heads, necks, owned by gravity now as war owned them and made them move to law; and the water is heavier than war, the heads bobbing freely there with each new wave lap. ̺ ̺ ̺ And if your arm offends you, cut it off. Then the leg by walking, tear out the eye, the trunk, body be eyeless, armless, bodiless. And if your brain offends you... If Christ offends you, tear him out, or if the earth offends you, skin her back in rolls, nailed to dry on barnside, an animal skin in sunlight; or the earth that girl's head, throwing herself from the asylum roof, head and earth whirling earthward. ̺ ̺ ̺ Or if we reoccur with death our humus, heat, as growths or even mushrooms; on my belly I sight for them at dead-leaf line - no better way - thinking there that I hear the incredible itch of things to grow, Spring, soon to be billion-jetted. ̺ ̺ ̺ Earth in the boy's hand, the girl's head, standing against the granary; earth a green apple he picked to throw at starlings, plucked from among green underleaves, silver leaf bellies burred with fine white hairs; the apple hurled, hurtling greenly with wet solidity, earth spinning in upon herself, shedding her brains and whales and oceans, her mountains strewn and crushed. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...COMPANIONS; A TALE OF A GRANDFATHER by CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY LA BELLA BONA ROBA by RICHARD LOVELACE TO-NIGHT by LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON THE RUBAIYAT, 1889 EDITION: 19 by OMAR KHAYYAM MONNA INNOMINATA, A SONNET OF SONNETS: 3 by CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI ALMOND BLOSSOM by EDWIN ARNOLD TO THE GIRL WHO HELPED IN THE WAR by JOSEPHINE DODGE DASKAM BACON SARAH THREENEEDLES (BOSTON, 1698) by KATHARINE LEE BATES SHADOWS ON THE WALL by ALEXANDER (ALEKSANDR) ALEXANDROVICH BLOK |