I SEEK A WILD STAR
WHAT seek you in this hoarse hard sand
That shuffles from your futile hand?
Your limbs are wry. With salt despair
All day the scant winds freeze your hair.
What mystery in the barren sand
Seek you to understand?
All day the acute winds’ finger-tips
Flay my skin and cleave my lips.
But though like fame about my skull
Leap the gibes of the cynic gull,
I shall not go from this place. I
Seek through all curved vacancy
Though the sea taunt me and frost scar,
I seek a star, a star!
Why seek you this, why seek you this
Of all distraught futilities?
The tide slides closer. The tide’s teeth
Shall bite your body with keen death!
Of all unspaced things that are
Vain, vain, most hideously far,
Why seek you then a star?
I seek a wild star, I that am
Eaten by earth and all her shame;
To whom fields, towns are a close clot
Of mud whence the worm dieth not;
To whom all running water is
Besnagged with timeless treacheries,
Who in a babe’s heart see designed
Mine own distortion and the blind
Lusts of all my kind!
Hence of all things that are
Vain, most hideously far,
A star, I seek, a star!