Why did he let her go?
To track her down;
All the sport of summer and spring, and flowers snapping at her ankles and catching her by the hair!
Poor Persephone and her rights for women.
Husband-snared hell-queen,
It is spring.
It is spring,
And pomp of husband-strategy on earth.
Ceres, kiss your girl, you think you’ve got her back.
The bit of husband-tilth she is,
Persephone!
Poor mothers-in-law!
They are always sold.
SICILIAN CYCLAMENS
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.